Poetry

Writing overly dramatic and just-plain-bad poetry is a surefire way of losing emotional intensity. I kept asking myself, ‘Where has my language gone?’ The answer comes in the form of a question: ‘What language?’ Even after giving oneself appropriate distance from the event – in my case the attack – how does one describe a violent spinning that lasts for hours? How does one describe severe nausea? Every time I tried to capture my symptoms in a poem it was ‘woe-is-me’, a plea for comfort, or, worse, didactic.

Sawako Nakayasu’s 2015 translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa and Sho Sugita’s 2017 translation of Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems of Hirato Renkichi each introduce an English-speaking audience to a key figure in Japanese modernism. Hirato Renkichi, born in 1893 in Osaka, has been hailed as Japan’s first futurist poet; Chika Sagawa, born in 1911 in a village on the northern island of Hokkaido, its first female modernist.’

Yes, Paradise Lost is still read today. It is the progenitor of the fantasy and science-fiction tradition through the epic tale it tells of the founding Judeo-Christian myth. Tolkien and Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, George RR Martin and the rest are the aftermath. But there is a good chance that Carey’s new edition will lead even more readers to its splendours, to wonder at its tragic action, epic music and transcendent strangeness.

Three new poetry collections, three Australian women poets: Present by Elizabeth Allen (Vagabond), Domestic Interior by Fiona Wright (Giramondo) and…

I first met Lachlan at Gleebooks in Sydney in 2014, at the launch of Judith Beveridge’s Storm and Honey. I remember speaking with him, and being confounded when he gave me his business card. He didn’t look like a ‘Brown’ – Lachlan is half-Chinese, and I had immediately assumed he would have a Chinese surname. In Lunar Inheritance, he explores the complexities of ethnic origin and identity as sited on his body and in his explorations of suburban Ashfield as well as the city of Guangzhou in China.

For most people, the great adventures of their lives are births, love affairs, illnesses, bereavements, starting businesses or changing jobs. Insights into our selves and our loved ones come through the difficult enough business of living together. Fay Zwicky writes about the way in which daily practices connect with deep struggles, the way culture lives, not in grand gestures and ritualised moments, but in commonplaces and taken for granted ways of thinking about things.

‘Rae Desmond Jones has stated that for him poetry and politics are mutually contradictory pursuits, yet his poetry, concerned with how people and classes interact, is, like all art, necessarily political.’

”In turning to McAuley’s own poetry for alternatives to what he had so passionately denounced in The End of Modernity, I find myself disappointed. Not that the poetry is bad. His best work is excellent and deserves a central place in the history of our mid twentieth-century poetry. But it is excellent in ways that are unexpected from the author of The End of Modernity, and it was not until later in his career that he found that voice.”

A lot of my trajectory has been determined by work. A lot of the influences that came into my work from radio, from Europe, from working in the music and sound poetry scenes in Europe, and a little bit of poetry, were also for making a living. So, I’m incredibly badly read now. And, of course, a lot of my life has been flying by the seat of my pants doing gigs.’

The heavy wooden door of the house is shut. I knock a few times and then move to the other side of the street. There, sitting against the wall of a house, I begin to scribble and sketch in my notebook, waiting and hoping that the door of the house might suddenly open. Maybe then I could peep inside and see the wooden stairway that Marina daily walked up to reach her apartment on the second floor. The miracle doesn’t happen.’