AustLit

'Peter Boyle now has such an established place in contemporary Australian poetry that it isn’t really necessary, once again, to go over the features of his distinctive poetic sensibility and the kinds of poems it produces, beyond repeating that his approach to poetry has its roots not in English language poetry but in the poetry of the Romance languages two of which, French and Spanish, he speaks fluently. He is also a translator and the task of translating brings a poet into a greater intimacy with the work of another poet than simply reading does: in a sense it requires a very special kind of reading. Unlike the comparatively unified earlier books Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness and Ideas of Travel, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is something of a compendium. It is made up of five sections, each with varying degrees of coherence, usually distinguished from the others thematically.' (Introduction)

'Stephen Edgar’s new book relates to the new poems in his Selected – significantly called The Strangest Place – by a process of extension. If those slightly earlier poems seemed obsessed by the weirdness of the world of appearances, the poems of Ghosts of Paradise could be said to be preoccupied by the nature of the organism that perceives that strangeness. Perhaps it’s true that our minds are weirder than the world they spend their limited life interacting with but at any rate it is the mind, consciousness itself, that comes to the surface as the overriding theme of these poems. And it is the idea of ghosts – chimera produced by the mind – that is the main vehicle for this theme.'(Introduction)          

'Half a century, as I’ve noted elsewhere, can be a very long time in poetic history: it’s the time between the death of Dr Johnson, for example, and the publication of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”. It’s now fifty years (more and less) since the publication of Les Murray’s Poems Against Economics. It’s his third book if one counts his contribution to The Ilex Tree (made up of sections by himself and Geoffrey Lehmann) as a single book but perhaps it would be more realistic to describe it, ala Fellini, as Murray’s second and a half. Poems Against Economics was the first complete book of Murray’s poems which I read and I remember, even today, how impressed I was by the long sequence “Walking to the Cattle-Place” which makes up almost half the book. Fifty years on seems a good time to revisit it to see how much it has changed.' (Introduction)

'Books of poetry are usually more than a random dump of poems. They, like the poems they contain, tend to have a structure, sometimes loose and sometimes very tight. Its function might be positive: to show the poems up in the best light by putting the strongest ones first, for example. And it might be defensive: to resist a charge of randomness or to place poems near each other so that they give each other some support and deepen the context of any single work. Both these books – Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier and Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian – raise the issue of book structure: it’s likely to be one of the things that a reader notices early on.' (Introduction)

'It’s always good to revisit the amazing world of Philip Hammial’s poetry, described with impressive accuracy by a quote on the cover as “a torrent of mischief, dark humour, idiosyncratic construction and invigorating chaos.” Dervishing is a two-part book made up of twenty-five pages of poems and nearly sixty pages of prose pieces. All but three of the poems are in one of Hammial’s familiar poetic modes, fairly extended pieces which are “surreal” in that their energy seems to derive from internal transformations as much as subject matter and which almost always create a shape by, in the last lines, returning to the opening statement or a variation thereof. And these openings are usually quite intense eruptions of a strong and slightly garbled speaking voice: “Only one Exit: climb the wolf ladder to the sheep sky & / jump”, “Work your Jesus: rob your hands of their money”, “Man must truss!”.' (Introduction)

'Sarah Holland-Batt’s brilliant new book is very much built around her father’s long illness and eventual passing. Not only is it the subject of the book’s first of four sections but the final section, which looks like being – like the third section of her previous book, The Hazards – about place and culture, is distorted, as it progresses, into poems about firstly her grandfather and his place – Gibraltar during the war – and finally her father in the long concluding sequence, “In My Father’s Country”. Not that readers of Holland-Batt’s work won’t have met the father before. He appears in “The Woodpile” an early poem of her first book, Aria, chopping wood in what seems to be a symbolically significant scene: the stacked wood encourages decay and various kinds of spider although “the heartwood burnt longest”. And in “Embouchure” and “The Flowers on His Bedside Speak of Eternity”, both from The Hazards, we re-encounter him, this time in a serious stage of the illness. The grandfather, especially his painting, also appears in two poems of Aria. In the light of the intense focus of The Jaguar, these seem like preliminary sketches, poems more interested in the poet’s unease than in forensically describing the father’s illness and seeing how something so extended and debilitating can be approached by poetry. We also find a reference to her father’s death in her excellent book of brief studies of individual Australian poems, Fishing for Lightning, when she looks at Brendan Ryan’s “A Father’s Silences” as an example of elegy. She has a response that reminds me of my own when my first child was born: astonishment at the fact that the world seemed to be going on in its ordinary way as though it were unaware that something earth-shattering had occurred. Of course, she met with “things dying, I with things newborn”.' (Introduction)

'The initial pleasure in connecting these two excellent books derived from what seemed their absolute difference. It was both rewarding and fun to actually read poems from each book alternately and I was tempted to structure what I want to say about them by seeing them as opposite poles of the poetic spectrum: the one being tonally inclined to the wry and in terms of subject matter very much about how we are located in the (comparatively) new digital age; the other, tonally serious and thematically concerned with how we live and interact with the natural world. A little thought showed this to be misguided: there are far more alien outposts in the map of poetry than these: “language” poetry, found, conceptual poetry, the various forms of text-fiddling, multi-authorship poems, and so on. In fact, thinking of as much of contemporary poetry as I know and imagining it as a map or many-cornered geometric shape, these two books would occupy a reasonably central position and might even be able to speak to each another.'

'One of the defining motifs of John A. Scott’s poetry and prose is the recurrent notion of an underground lying beneath the surfaces we are accustomed to treading on. It is the source of his interest in the myth of Orpheus – who ventures into one version of that underground in search of Eurydice – and the complex notions of creativity and death which, following Rilke and the late nineteenth century French poets, he teases out and deploys. There are many other undergrounds from the sewers of Paris in Before I Wake to the network of tunnels which underlie the reality of the events of N and connect distant times and places as well as distant and dissonant voices. The imperative for poor Telford in N is expressed by the sinister Esther Cole when she tells him that, if he is to uncover how her husband died, he will have to “dig deeper . . . not just for my sake but for yours”. Digging deeper is also the imperative that lies behind good criticism, differentiating it from material that considers that its task is, Petronius-like, to separate “good” from “bad”, and from material that thinks that its main function is to bolt a specific, contemporary interest onto a defenceless text and see how it matches up. Peter D. Mathews’ book, From Poet to Novelist, is an example of good criticism in that it sees its function to be to tease out what the underlying generative structures in Scott’s work are. It’s not an easy task since Scott’s books are, for all their superficial attractivenesses, immensely complex in construction.' (Introduction)

'In just over one hundred days it will be fifty years since Michael Dransfield’s death in 1973. A half a century, as I have observed elsewhere, is a very long time in literature, especially modern literature and especially modern poetry whose history – influenced at least partly by the accessibility of poetry from what were, in the past, unavailable cultures and languages – is inclined to develop at breakneck speed. With a nice harmony, it is twenty years since the publication of this retrospective edited by John Kinsella which, itself, appeared after the two major contributions to understanding Dransfield’s life and work: Livio Dobrez’s Parnassus Mad Ward: Michael Dransfield and the New Australian Poetry (1990) and Patricia Dobrez’s biography of 1999.' (Introduction)

'Lucy Dougan’s fourth book operates in the same territory as the last two of its predecessors – White Clay and The Guardians – exploiting the unexpected perspectives of her distinct vision of the world. A good deal of the apparatus of the book – its title and the description included in the blurb which is transposed from the back cover into the half-title page – prepares us for this. Monster Field is an idea taken from Paul Nash to express worlds which are apprehended momentarily at the edge of vision and which have the power to disturb the preformed, edited view that makes up our sense of what is happening. I have a feeling that this is very much post facto. Lucy Dougan’s poetry has been interesting exactly because this has been her mode of operating and it’s a mode that enables her to escape conventional tropes and predictable interests and responses. She lives simultaneously in an ordinary and extraordinary world and anyone reading her poems would have picked this up without requiring any kind of critical apparatus (Creative Writing Project-style) as a support.'  (Introduction)

'Theodore Ell’s book has all the features that one hopes to find in a first book of poems: a distinctive manner, a distinctive tone of voice and a distinctive view not only of things in the world but of what a poem might make of these things. There is also an avoidance of the conventional styles and solutions that one is likely to find in contemporary Australian poems although the book’s title, which works at a number of possible puns, does use a technique common among poets. “Beginning in Sight” can be read as “Beginning Insight”, but its more apparent meaning is that we should expect the sense of sight to be the dominant one in the poems that follow – it will be where they begin. And this is certainly established in the book’s first poem, “Mooring” – whose title also suggests that it will deal with the way that the poems are anchored – which begins with two stanzas of very precise visual registration:..' (Introduction)

'So large is Alan Wearne’s collected body of work, exploring the lives of Australia’s under-, working-, and middle-classes that Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021 isn’t at all a traditional selected poems, the sort that tries to collect the best-known and most important examples of a poet’s work and present them in such a way that a new reader can get a compressed overview. True, this could be said of the last two sections of Near Believing, the one selecting from the short poems of The Australian Popular Songbook and the other, “Metropolitan Poems and Other Poems” selecting from among reasonably recent mid-length narratives and monologues. But Wearne’s poetic activity in the last quarter (or perhaps even third) of the twentieth century was dedicated to two very large works, The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers which, put together, amount to nearly a thousand pages. The former is represented in Near Believing by a single long monologue and, although the latter gets nearly fifty pages, including Kevin Joy’s long monologue “Nothing But Thunder”, it’s only a fragment of the enormous and complex whole. In the case of these two mega-works, in other words, readers get not so much a selection as a sampler, something that might give one a faint sense of these books and perhaps, hopefully, lure one to explore their complexities further.' (Introduction)

'The poems of Claire Potter’s new book, like those of its predecessor, Swallow, are simultaneously fascinating and challenging. It feels as though the book itself understands this and does its best to help you because there is a lot of material devoted to exploring what it is that the poems are actually doing. To begin with, there is a short note, preceding the first poem, which describes the inspiration behind the capitals of a Corinthian column. A basket covered with a roof tile was placed above the grave of a young girl. A dormant acanthus plant grew around the pot and over the tile, curving inwards as it rounded the corner. Seeing this, Callimachus decided to use it as a model – a challenging one – for a new kind of capital. This image is crossed with a quote from Derrida that seems to say much the same thing: “Everything will flower at the edge of a desolate tomb”. In a way these are both assertions that the baroque will evolve around emptiness: as Merwin says (or implies) somewhere, the bigger the emptiness of the doorspace, the more elaborate the decoration of the doorway. Why this is the case can be open to debate? is the emptiness loss or absence – they aren’t entirely the same. Does the art compensate for the nothingness or does it derive from it and thus, in a way, express it? The answer to that probably depends on where the philosophical tradition that you work within comes from. To make things a little more complex we are told, at the end of this note, that the poems of the book “might be said to begin” on the overlapping edges of the two accounts (Derrida and Vitruvius – who tells the story of Callimachus’s inspiration) and thus introduces the word “edge” which is going to figure largely in the poems to come. At the other end of the book is its blurb. Readers of these reviews will know that it is not a genre that I ever feel is very helpful for a critic and, I suppose, it isn’t intended to be since its main function is to lure innocent readers to buy the book. But in this case, the blurb has more help to offer, describing the poems as dwelling “in the landscapes of edges”, being interested in “surreal gardens, oblique geometries, cloud rooms, witches, and childhood remembrances”, all elements that can easily be traced in individual poems.' (Introduction)

 (Introduction)