AustLit

'The achievements of the poets who started publishing in the early 1980s in Australia have tended to be overshadowed by those of the generation immediately prior to them. Rochford Press was started in 1983 by Mark Roberts and Adam Aitken, catching the tail-end of the little mag boom of the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s it was the imprint of the poetry little mag P76 and also published four collections (by Mark Roberts, Rob Finlayson, Les Wicks and Dipti Saravanamuttu). The press wound down activity in the early 1990s, and nothing more was published until Rochford Street Review started up in 2011, a neat demonstration that poetry makes its own time. Alongside the Review, which will shortly publish its 29th issue, there have been a handful of publications, mostly retrospective: the ‘best of’ compilation drawn from Rae Desmond Jones’ little mag Your Friendly Fascist, and the wonderful festschrift for Cornelis Vleeskens. More recently, with Linda Adair as publisher, the press has focused on current poetry, specifically a series of chapbooks that includes the two books under review: Sarah St Vincent Welch’s OPEN and Juan Garrido Salgado’s Cuando Fui Clandestino / When I Was Clandestine.' (Introduction)

'In all of his books, Laurie Duggan has tended to avoid the ‘well-formed poem’. His poems are not of the kind that unroll like carpets: replete with interconnected images, sonic patterning, argument. A large part of his poetic approach emerges from an attempt to not speak over what is already there, or, as he writes in one poem, to ‘not neutralise / the effect of atmosphere’. This might be described as permitting the incidental, letting things in, but it’s also – Duggan being a self-described minimalist – much to do with omission. The model his oeuvre provides is one that prioritises listening (and looking) over speaking, and in that sense it is anti-bardic. ‘The poem’ as a discrete object is often, and almost entirely within this collection, given over to the series, allowing Duggan to retain qualities of the short lyric while building long-form structures whose rhythms become apparent over years or, in the case of ‘Blue Hills’, over decades.' (Introduction)

'The figures of the Heide circle have attained the status of myth and legend, and as such they are available for reimagining, just as Ned Kelly was for Sidney Nolan. That is one of the implicit claims, and achievements, of this extremely ambitious work of social and art history as poetry. Heide is a long, composite work made up of 219 separate poems, many of which are themselves series of poems. It is also the final volume of what is now revealed to be a trilogy, one that adds up to just over 2000 pages (and weighs in at a challenging 2.5kg).' (Introduction)

 'This first full-length volume draws from poems written over roughly ten years: prose sequences, sonnets or thereabouts, parody-homages, a metro poem, psychical collaborations, and drawn from small-print chapbooks. Combining a condensed lyricism, collage, and durational procedures, the collection works its way through days and the everyday (near accidents, a working salad, the assumptions of architecture)...

'The sense of fleeting glimpse, of provisionality, of actual sense-data taken in but not yet possessed, is terrific. Is it 'lyric'? Well, yes--but with a stylistic affiliation to Projective and subsequent aesthetics. And no--in the sense that Wright does not seek that laurel or that identification.' (Publication summary)

'A few pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in click here for what we do. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory (in this way she sometimes brings to mind a serious hiker, weighing the items in her pack by the gram). And yet, she cannot help but take on that extra weight of the past; her present is perforated by it. This dialectic of memory and forgetting runs through the collection. For Brown especially, there is no satisfactory point of rest or synthesis: it is not only memory’s burden that she has to contend with but also the particular ways that the memories of her own generation of sixty-eighters have been imagined and historicised.'  (Introduction)

'The poem as a whole reads, Chinese characters, a shelf on which stand burnt sticks of incense and three oranges, wind gusts broken branches mauve shadows under the jacaranda and oddly, a row of cypress pines along the tin wall of the Rheem factory Apparent gaps in the poem give the visual record of omission. Unlike the previous poems discussed, "Blue Hills 38" is not aerial but works at ground level, describing the historical layers of a suburban area of Melbourne; the poem as a whole reads, Lanes I will never trace of sheoak and flowering gum fork through these suburbs under the campanile, Mentone, where the rail curves towards the bay and its townships: median clock towers and creek borders, overtaken by the city, the lowlands between, drained, filled in, overlooked by railway stations, a vista from Edithvale to Wheelers Hill. The speculation here regards the question of art's relationship-in this case, of non-Aboriginal art-to its environment in Australia and its willingness to allow its language and conventions to be thereby changed. [...]the line democratizes art and heat as simply two small words, two potentially volatile ingredients. The properties of art and heat in "Blue Hills 48" are mirrored by a transformative exchange between architecture and art: australian mercantile lanD concrete lettering embossed around the warehouse entablature broken off on one wall leaving the infill of words in red brick, a negative space with the unexpected gravity of a Magritte.' (Publication abstract)

'This article provides an introduction to the early poetry of Ken Bolton through the broad theme of temporality. Bolton’s early, avowedly modernist, poetics is explored through close readings of two long poems written and published in the 1970s, “The Terrific Days of Summer,” and “Serial Treatise.” “Terrific Days” is, firstly, a poem of and about plurality—a resounding ethos of the 1970s—and is a poem made tense with its many oppositions. For its speed and its high-key immediacy, the poem appears to refute any need for explicatory criticism. And yet, when read in terms of temporality, several “times” of the work soon emerge: diurnal (of “days”), seasonal (of summer), and historical or epochal (the mid-seventies and the Dismissal of November 11, 1975). The poem’s use of a repetition-with-variation structure proffers a kind of mock-empiricism, drawing on the poetry of Kenneth Koch and work by the artist Noel Sheridan. Yet the poem also, importantly, adopts simultaneist and lyrical guises; particular durations are collapsed and collaged into one: a historical moment of rupture whose explosive import is signalled in the opposing senses of the title’s adjective. This reading of “Terrific Days” is contrasted with a reading of the long poem “Serial Treatise,” published in Bolton’s own magazine, Magic Sam, and written, in part, as a critical response to earlier poems, including “Terrific Days.” The poem is, by Bolton’s estimation, his most sustained example of a process poem, that is to say a poem which writes the process—the time—of its own composition. Contrasting the modes of simultaneist collage and process in the two poems, the article teases out some of the connections between the epochal moment of the mid-1970s and the differing time senses the two poems evoke, and in which they participate.'  (Publication abstract)