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'After two decades-plus of quiet yet pointed observations in both Australia and the United States, The Blue Decodes is poetry by a woman speaking for herself and just as importantly about her generation, a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented. Yet, as Cassie Lewis advises throughout her work, all that optimistic blue we once saw beckoning can be regained, decoded if you will, that we may become our original, authentic selves.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Cassie Lewis The Blue Decodes
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 77 no. 2 2017; (p. 259-263)'The decades in the making of The Blue Decodes have paid off. at the level of the book, it is a model of organisation; at the level of the poem, of balancing language, image, and of positive with negative affect in the lyric. There’s a sense of acceptance of the mundane in these poems, rather than that of a cleansed artifact (editing’s danger). In the book’s early poems, Lewis’s voicing modulates interior melodrama in modernist fashion: but perhaps more like Woolf than eliot. hints of religious desperation resemble similar phrasings by Emma Lew. There are some nice syntactic touches, too: “that you shelter, take in” (Vanguard); “where we don’t keep birds, God’s aviary” (in the Aviary). These are poems of mood and meditation. both back cover blurbers use the word “subtle.” The poems can seem expressionist, as if Lewis is designing a series of allegorical rooms.' (Introduction)
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Fragmentation
2017
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 394 2017; (p. 58)Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time. (Introduction)
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Geoff Page Reviews The Blue Decodes by Cassie Lewis
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , April no. 20 2017;
— Review of The Blue Decodes 2016 selected work poetry 'The Blue Decodes is the latest collection in a now considerable list from Grand Parade Poets, going back to 2011. It’s a diverse stable ranging from young avant-gardists (such as the late Benjamin Frater) through to Selected Poems from well-established, but somewhat neglected, senior poets such as Evan Jones.' (Introduction) -
Liam Ferney Reviews Cassie Lewis
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 March vol. 57 no. 1 2017; 'After spending my teenage years with only Dorothy Porter for Australian poetry company, I discovered HEAT magazine in the orderly periodical shelves of the University of Queensland’s Social Sciences and Humanities Library. I was supposed to be learning how to write essays for EN152, instead I was learning how Australians wrote poetry. Until then I had thought it was only Brits, Yanks and James Gleeson who wrote poetry, but it turned out people from this country, only a decade or so older than myself, were writing poems about things I recognised in language that was familiar. Chief among the poets who dazzled me on those distracted days was Cassie Lewis, a precociously talented young Melbournian riding high at the turn of the millennium. As well as publishing regularly in key magazines, her work was collected in the era’s two important anthologies of Australian poetry: Michael Brennan and Peter Minter’s Calyx and Ron Pretty’s New Music. Still only in her mid-twenties, Lewis was the fourth youngest poet in Pretty’s book and perhaps (not all birthdates are listed) the youngest in Brennan’s and Minter’s. She was one of only a dozen poets who appeared in both.' (Introduction)
-
Geoff Page Reviews The Blue Decodes by Cassie Lewis
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , April no. 20 2017;
— Review of The Blue Decodes 2016 selected work poetry 'The Blue Decodes is the latest collection in a now considerable list from Grand Parade Poets, going back to 2011. It’s a diverse stable ranging from young avant-gardists (such as the late Benjamin Frater) through to Selected Poems from well-established, but somewhat neglected, senior poets such as Evan Jones.' (Introduction) -
Liam Ferney Reviews Cassie Lewis
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 March vol. 57 no. 1 2017; 'After spending my teenage years with only Dorothy Porter for Australian poetry company, I discovered HEAT magazine in the orderly periodical shelves of the University of Queensland’s Social Sciences and Humanities Library. I was supposed to be learning how to write essays for EN152, instead I was learning how Australians wrote poetry. Until then I had thought it was only Brits, Yanks and James Gleeson who wrote poetry, but it turned out people from this country, only a decade or so older than myself, were writing poems about things I recognised in language that was familiar. Chief among the poets who dazzled me on those distracted days was Cassie Lewis, a precociously talented young Melbournian riding high at the turn of the millennium. As well as publishing regularly in key magazines, her work was collected in the era’s two important anthologies of Australian poetry: Michael Brennan and Peter Minter’s Calyx and Ron Pretty’s New Music. Still only in her mid-twenties, Lewis was the fourth youngest poet in Pretty’s book and perhaps (not all birthdates are listed) the youngest in Brennan’s and Minter’s. She was one of only a dozen poets who appeared in both.' (Introduction) -
Fragmentation
2017
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 394 2017; (p. 58)Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time. (Introduction)
-
Cassie Lewis The Blue Decodes
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 77 no. 2 2017; (p. 259-263)'The decades in the making of The Blue Decodes have paid off. at the level of the book, it is a model of organisation; at the level of the poem, of balancing language, image, and of positive with negative affect in the lyric. There’s a sense of acceptance of the mundane in these poems, rather than that of a cleansed artifact (editing’s danger). In the book’s early poems, Lewis’s voicing modulates interior melodrama in modernist fashion: but perhaps more like Woolf than eliot. hints of religious desperation resemble similar phrasings by Emma Lew. There are some nice syntactic touches, too: “that you shelter, take in” (Vanguard); “where we don’t keep birds, God’s aviary” (in the Aviary). These are poems of mood and meditation. both back cover blurbers use the word “subtle.” The poems can seem expressionist, as if Lewis is designing a series of allegorical rooms.' (Introduction)
