AustLit

'When opening a slim volume of poetry entitled Land Art, a reader might expect a collection of ecopoetics. Instead, Stuart Cooke offers what might be termed “egopoetics.” A critical reader of both his own work and the poetry of numerous writers from around the (not just English-speaking) world, Cooke offers an exegesis for Land Art in the Forward. Less an apology, defence, or justification, the Forward is more an exploration of questions raised by writing and drawing about the relationship between poet-speaker and land. For Cooke, writing and sketching are both linguistic artforms, and he points to the history of writing in the West as ineluctable from the aesthetic and the visual. He points to the time before the printing press rendered prose and poetry prosaic and illuminated manuscripts grew scarce. As Cooke observes in the Forward to his collection, “the printed alphabet is embedded in long histories of aesthetic decisions.” ' (Introduction)

'You might assume that the poetry of a musician who namechecks Lead Belly, Charles Mingus, and Stevie Wonder would be full of soul. You’d be wrong. Instead, Losing Touch, Andrew Leggett’s third collection, is full of heart. Here, we find the burning hearts of lovers, the strained hearts of the lonely, the dancing hearts of dead poets, the cardiac arrests of the elderly, the steady pulse of youth, the arrythmia of the patient denied a transplant, and the syncopated symphony of all the hearts in the mental hospital beating out of time with the society that shuts them in.' (Introduction)

'Rebecca Edwards’ latest collection of poetry, Plague Animals, takes its name from its penultimate poem, “Plague Animals: 1985” (101). The speaker confesses to crying when she first saw the sprawling concrete megalopolis of Tokyo from the window of a bus full of chattering Australian teenagers excited to explore a foreign country under the comforting wings of their host families. The “entire vista” of cement, glass, flyovers, and neon lights “was an accusation: this is what it comes to / you clever, / clever monkeys” (101).' (Introduction)

'In his masterful new short fiction collection, Young Love and Other Stories, Félix Calvino explores the shadows, shades, and occasionally shady dealings of the people who inhabit a village in the Carballo area of Galicia, Spain. The interplay between light and shade, silhouettes, shadows, and mirrors, is central to this collection. These stories of village life are set in a liminal time: post-war but pre-electricity. At the one-room school, the lone teacher makes annual promises that the shrinking village will be connected to the grid the following year, while a dwindling group of ageing men gather after the winter rains each spring to fix the unsealed roads.' (Introduction)