Reviews

Litmus by Kerry Scuffins
Fire Islands Press, 2006

Litmus measures the world’s volatile climate and shows the reader the cracks beneath the surface of society. The tongue-in-cheek title of this poetry collection acknowledges the binaries of society and then smashes through them with strong language and an even stronger sense of line. Kerry Scuffins is a loud poet: her lines are broken for meaning and for sound, her metaphors are in your face, and she makes no apologies for inserting politics and her opinions into her poetry. Some might argue that politics are a fickle thing to use, but her work is honest in its bluntness: you may not like or agree with her, but the cards are all on the table and they’re face up.
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Between Headlands by Connie Barber
Five Islands Press, 2006

According to AUSTLIT: The Australian Literature Resource, Connie Barber’s fourth collection of poetry, Between Headlands, has only been reviewed on one occasion by any print or on-line journal in this country since its publication. I am surprised by this lack, as I believe Barber has an established writing career and a public presence. Barber deserves a greater critical reception than she currently enjoys, and hopefully this substantial book will further establish her already published oeuvre.
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Event by Judith Bishop
Salt Publishing, 2007

To speak of Judith Bishop’s poetry is perhaps to speak, necessarily, of the image. Of course, in the context of 20th century poetics, this term carries within it an unfortunately thorny and convoluted lineage. From Ezra Pound’s use of the concept against the Georgians to Ponge’s against the Surrealists, the image has always constituted a controversial node, its problems and paradoxes traversing diverse ideological mires of competing poetic modernities.
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Revolving Days: Selected Poems by David Malouf
University of Queensland Press, 2008

In the very appropriately titled Revolving Days, David Malouf has put together a selection of poems that addresses the past, place and its importance to self-definition, the memory of houses emptied of family and objects yet full of what’s left behind and filling up the present. The poems exhibit a quality which, with political comments more subtle than Les Murray’s and longings less romanticised than Robert Adamson’s, declares that the places where the emotions taken from another world rendezvous are always present and clear in comprehending the discrepancy between place-and-mind and feeling-and-emotion.
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a raiders guide by Michael Farrell
Giramondo Publishing, 2008

Apart from a solitary ‘1,’ the first page of a raiders guide is blank. Note the presence of the comma. What it suggests of the pages that follow is a transience between the concrete (‘.’) and the absent (‘ ’). The book’s entry functions as much as a point of departure as one of beginning; we all delve into different interstices. So we come to the first poem: unanchored by a table of contents (which, along with page numbers, a raiders guide does not have) yet, unlike the rest of the poems, it is ordered into dense blocks of text. It’s called ‘sprinter’; it begins by “Walking through, in/out: my son a shadow? His mind marks the boundaries…” We are in the mercurial, the gaseous, where pressures force feelings into significations which, almost as quickly, escape through ever-present fissures of syntax. Welcome to Michael Farrell’s new book of poems!
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Transit by Mike Ladd
Five Islands Press, 2007

I find it a rare and lovely treat when a poet can become androgynous, or cross over discretely from a masculine voice to one that is feminine. While some of my favourite poets are steeped entirely in one gender or the other and that, indeed, can be their strength, I do want to draw attention to Mike Ladd. Perhaps his ability to move from soft themes of family and imagistic sensations to critical and satirical comments on the modern world is the reasoning for the title of Ladd’s latest collection, Transit, because that would explain the great mystery to me. Without that possibility, I have one true criticism of this striking collection and that is the soundness of the title.
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The Australian Popular Songbook by Alan Wearne
Giramondo Publishing, 2008

It seems to me that a poem should – in general – be a self-contained unit, either easily understood or a puzzle that contains the key to its solution. I’m happy to make exceptions for poems written in different eras or countries – such poems might need annotations to compensate for unfamiliar historical or cultural contexts. It’s surprising, then, how hard it is to understand the poems in Alan Wearne’s latest collection, The Australian Popular Songbook, which bases itself largely in 20th-century Australian popular culture.
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In the Garden by Miriel Lenore
Wakefield Press, 2007

In response to the effects of global climate change, and probably informed by earlier exponents like natural historian Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Eric Rolls and so on, the literary genre ‘nature writing’ has been re-invigorated and a new genre, ‘ecopoetry’, has emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Miriel Lenore’s sixth collection of poetry, In the Garden, reminds me of this, yet, whilst obviously aware of those strands in contemporary writing, it doesn’t entirely fit the categories.
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That Little Something by Charles Simic
Harcourt, 2008

An interesting aspect of Serbian-born Charles Simic’s being chosen as the United States’ 15th Poet Laureate is that Simic, partly due to his experience of a European childhood during the Second World War, has often been something of an ‘anti-war’ poet. What makes this dimension of Simic’s work somewhat odd is that the United States is, of course, currently engaged in an interminable ‘war on terror’. As such, Simic’s poems and his becoming the country’s current Poet Laureate testify to the complexity of contemporary American culture, a culture that is both militaristic and pacifistic, selfish and compassionate.

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Old/New World: New & Selected Poems by Peter Skrzynecki
University of Queensland Press, 2007

Peter Skrzynecki is renowned for his poetic rendering of migrant experience, over three decades, and was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia “for his contribution to multicultural literature” in 2002. His Immigrant Chronicle (1975) is a prescribed text for the New South Wales HSC, which has ensured continued exposure for Skrzynecki’s poetry, as well as sales of over 20,000 for Immigrant Chronicle. This is commendable, but, of course, it has to be said that Skrzynecki cannot speak for all migrants and the range of their experiences. Nor does he probably intend to.
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