AustLit

'Nearly thirty years after her death, Gwen Harwood remains one of Australia’s most significant and distinctive poets. Author of more than 420 poems and libretti, Harwood is renowned for her brilliance and trickery, her technical virtuosity, her passions and furies. In her early career, through a number of mostly male pseudonyms, she was able to give voice to feminist issues at a time when women struggled for visibility and recognition. By the end of her life, Gwen Harwood was a public figure in her own right and a unique, powerful presence in Australian literary circles. However, very little was known about her as a person, nor the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems.' (Introduction)

'Under review here are two smashing books by Eugen Bacon: Chasing Whispers and An Earnest Blackness, both snapped up by a US publisher, the twin houses of Anti-Oedipus Press and Raw Dog Screaming. One is a collection of Afro-Australian stories, the other a selection of essays that interrogates black writing and black speculative fiction, including some of its author’s in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter.' (Introduction)

'The title of this review is taken from the superbly restrained love story ‘Beyond the Doubting of Shadows’, from Dominique Hecq’s most recent short story collection, Smacked and other stories of addiction (2021, pp. 87–92). Do shadows speak? This question ghosts each of the stories and the umbra that binds them. Hecq is in conversation with the complexity of the question through the depiction of various forms of addiction, habit, and substance abuse – casting shadows, blocking the light that eclipses sources of illumination – ‘Addiction comes in rainbow, unrainbow’ (p. 20). Hecq speaks in tongues of refraction, from a number of fictional vantage points.' (Introduction)

'How poetry looks on the page matters. For English-language poetry based on conventional patterns of rhyme and rhythm, the line forms the basic structural unit. Each line contains a more or less fixed number of stresses or beats, and ends in a word that fits the overall rhyming scheme. The lines are then grouped into verses, each of which may follow a similar pattern or which may vary with the larger scale organisation of the piece. The tight linkage between visual structure and sound is so pervasive, we tend to take it for granted. Indeed, for many readers, this is what defines a “poem”.'(Introduction)

'Undercoat by Mark O’Flynn is billed as a book of ekphrastic ‘poems about paintings’ but is as much a book of poems about painters and the process of painting and viewing. For beyond a mere depiction of the paintings that inspired them, these poems offer a beguiling presentation of frames-within-frames and perspectives that gesture to what is out of sight, beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the frame.' (Introduction)

'Have you got anything less domestic? may be a debut, but Emilie Collyer is no debutante. She is an award-winning playwright of international renown. And although this is her first poetry collection, Collyer is a long established, much loved and highly regarded voice in the Melbourne poetry scene, and her poems have been widely anthologised. As Lisa Gorton observes in her endorsement, ‘this is the work of years’. Indeed, those years are keenly felt – in the honed poetic craft as well as the weight of grief accrued by a woman navigating midlife, a woman who unwittingly finds herself ‘the adult in this house’ (p. 19) and wonders if life might have anything more alluring on offer.'(Introduction)