Poetry

‘joanne burns keeps language moving, and her shifts between first and second person are part of that ceaseless motion. She makes that second person work for her, effortlessly ploughing, turning up the unexpected. She writes in third person too, but there’s something special about the slippage between ‘I’ and ‘you’ in her poetry. Sometimes she’s talking to me, or to you, sometimes she’s talking to herself.’

‘I stood with my face almost touching a wall of glass, a sheer window looking out into an immense depth, a profound, almost unfathomable dark green chasm girded by sandstone precipices and a halo of mist and cloud. It had been raining all afternoon. In the diminishing light the distant wet cliffs looked dark orange, blood red, gold. A motionless wing of pure white cloud floated over the valley floor like an apparition on a billow of air.’

‘Two projects of collective authorship, these books interrupt the singular authority that has imposed the Intervention onto Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and mandatory immigration detention onto asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat.’

It’s almost thirty years since The Ash Range was first published. Things change, politically and personally, in thirty years.

What we are meant to think about are words, about the capacity of language to do other than what it seems to be doing. As someone with a professional interest herself in what tricks language can get up to (‘the sonic out-wraps the saying, the canon is in it for kicks’, the voice of ‘Subvoices’ tells us), Smith has much to say (2016, p. 90). She lets us off lightly of course, as we are disarmed by her sharp wit, but however playful the poetic surface is, the worries about language are real and are communicated.

Skovron’s work falls across a number of complex cultural modes. While he has many important things to say about the migrant experience, he also has much to say about more general issues relating to human ontology, as well as to his experience of living in Sydney and Melbourne.

Sylvia Plath was one of the first poets I read, one of the first poets I was really moved by, the first poet who I really loved. But it’s not ‘Sheep in Fog’ that started me thinking again about Plath. It’s my friend Lucy.

What is this obsession with facts, so insistent in Fitzroy: The Biography, that their enumeration appears to be fundamental to the composition of the book? One obvious explanation would be that the foregrounding of fact dramatises the encounter with history, which after all presents itself primarily in the form of documents and testimonies. But this can’t be a full answer, first because while the outlines of the featured characters are drawn from historical sources, the facts that embellish them generally are not; and second because π.ο.’s interest in the poetic use of facts and statistics goes back decades, well before the writing of Fitzroy: The Biography.

‘The poetry of Dmitris Tsaloumis, who died earlier this month, will be read time and again by young poets who want to feel the otherness of poetic language or experience the otherness within the poetic language. His translingualism is the home of contemporary sensitivity: “I arrived on time though I had no address,” he says one of his poems. He reached Australian poetry at the right moment, when a poetic regime change was necessary and desired. In his best poems, we have the impression that the unseen had found its proper musical translation and localised a home for his poetic existence. As long as young poets exist who worship the plasticity and the solidity of poetic expression, his work will be read—and that’s greatest praise anyone can give a poet.’

‘There are other Australian poems about cricket, but no one but Nick Whittock has taken it for their major theme. For Whittock, cricket – the matches, the players, the history, and its accompanying discourse: of commentary, commodification (sponsorship), and sensation (cricket on the front pages) – is not only his subject, but his medium.’ Michael Farrell on Nick Whittock and the Australian avant-garde.