Poetry

Biographies juxtapose competing views of particular events, moments and aspects of Plath’s life. Red Comet, over a thousand pages, takes in all the other Plath biographies before it. Scholarship is meant to work like this, as is legal precedent. Biography is like a party game where each person adds to a story, repeating and elaborating on what has come before.

When I began
reading how to make a basket
I wanted to find out what I could do
with the text. How would I tend to
the ‘how to’ aspect of its title?

Andrada can share testimony of some of her most painful, personal experiences, but choose exactly which parts of herself to reveal and which to remain hidden. Look, she invites her reader, look at how skillfully I can create all these perfect likenesses of myself. And watch as I destroy them all.

After being cooped up for so long, and after enduring all the grief that comes with life, with none of…

Rather than read representations of land in terms of the politics they support or contest, what happens when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land? I am suggesting that this is (continues to be) the primary way to read Australian poetry as Australian poetry, politically. (Readings of poetry through lenses of class or other struggle are not primary in terms of their national character, only as they, too, relate to land.) My test case is Marty Hiatt’s long poem ‘the manifold’.

Borderless is not ‘Australian’ or even ‘Australian Feminist Poetry’ – it’s transnational. Not international. Transnational – borderless. Most of these poets live on this continent, but not all. I should probably relax and let myself be confused about definitions for now. Because a poetry anthology is full of poems, poems with their own confusions, pains and delights. Time to talk about the poems, and then return to what brings the poems together, hopefully I’ll be less confused.

Change Machine is an ambitious collection which has two standout accomplishments. One is its formal eclecticism and dexterity; the other is its contribution to Australian poetics in drawing on local vernacular and literary influence, and subjecting these to international currents.

I learn that I have not made the interview stage for the role I had been performing for years prior. I walk to Campsie to meet with J, a former housemate, for a sauna, to sweat and swear. Like G, J has taken a ‘voluntary separation package’ from a different institution, and seems transformed since absconding from the academy. We strip off and I vent my spleen in the steam.

‘A testament to love and joy in the face of ongoing dispossession, continued violence and lack of recognition of the rights of First Nations peoples in Canada and abroad.’

Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is a gift to a reviewer that doesn’t want to paraphrase poems, for a reader that doesn’t need such summarising.