AustLit

'Approaching Jaya Savige’s third full-length poetry collection—a substantial and unusual work, one that appears nine years after his last, Surface to Air—I found myself thinking about what poetry is. Not all poetry reminds you of this question, and it is because Change Machine offers several models of poetry as a literary art that it occurred to me. Contemporary poetry collections typically employ a single model of poetry: for instance, as a method for formally resolving intense feeling/impression/thought using a first person voice, or as an artful exploration of language itself, often in the absence of narrative. Discussion around contemporary poetry can also suffer from under-definition. Readers and critics may label a piece of writing ‘lyrical’ or ‘poetic’ without arguing why, thereby implying that anything can be lyric or poetry. Over-definition may also occur, particularly by the academically-trained, who may insist on rigid demarcations between poetries with longer lineages and ‘non-poetries’ of experimentation (‘for experimentation’s sake’) and off-the-page performance. Western literary criticism has accrued taxonomically complex definitions of poetry over millennia. But as I read Change Machine, I thought loosely of the free-verse poem as a formally inventive puzzle, often in a first person voice, that subtly or radically conceals its ‘content’.' (Introduction)