Poetry
Dissolution and Reclamation: Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ by John Mateer
Places are, of course, not exchangeable, but in Mateer’s roaming imaginary they become, at least to some extent, drawn into a kind of codification of broad historical tendencies and movements. This constitutes a way of rethinking traditional narrative historical accounts and their often doubtful ‘truths’. Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ is a book about imagined geographies as much as real ones.
Wave after wave: when they came / for you elegies / of resistance
Barnett’s language works in a kind of shorthand: the reader is left to fill in the blanks, provide conjunctions, make connections. Sense is not a product of grammatical syntax but of progressions and repetitions. Names, place names and languages other than English – there are lengthy quotations in French from sources as diverse as Derrida, Mao Tse Tung, Wittgenstein and the Bible – are given equal weight and poetic rephrasing.
Bully-proof: John Kinsella
The quality of poetic thought in Armour is erratic. To a significant extent, it borrows the prestige of technical and specialist realms, while using devices that obscure meaning with the aim of suggesting a profundity beyond the commonplace. Despite the flexibility and richness of Kinsella’s associative powers, thought remains largely undeveloped, unassimilated, disembodied.
In a poetry world: Home by Dark by Pam Brown
What a great title: Home by Dark. A mere three syllables that slide from warm to cool, from safe-haven to the unknown. By themselves these three words seem almost nonsensical, only grammatical when we imagine the sentences they might belong to, or have come from.
Oh Walt, you’re a leaky vessel
Readers of Lawrence who are curious, as we should be, about how these poems came into being – their provenance and history, how each one is related to Lawrence’s circumstances at the moment of his writing and where it stands in the complex development of his thought – have every reason to be grateful, both to Christopher Pollnitz, the editor, and to the press.
The onward surge: Dante: The Divine Comedy translated by Clive James
Here lies one of the key challenges for a modern translator. How to get the dramatis personae to communicate across the centuries? The convention is to provide some contextual information in footnotes and appendices, but James wants none of this pedantry and aims instead to incorporate essential points in the verse.
Haunted rooms: Hotel Hyperion by Lisa Gorton
Memory, imagination, dreaming, invention and protean makings: such preoccupations are at the heart of Lisa Gorton’s new poetry collection, Hotel Hyperion. This relatively short and condensed book returns again and again… to related tropes and imagery: weather, mirrors, rooms, crystals, hauntings and strange effects of light.
Fasten your seatbelts: Prepare the Cabin for Landing by Alan Wearne
If I were selecting a Modern Australian Poetry XI, Wearney, like his near-namesake in another kind of XI, would be one of the automatic choices. To my mind (and ear), he is one of the best formal poets writing in Australia today.
Post- Poundian places: The Collected Blue Hills by Laurie Duggan
The Blue Hills poems are so palpably about place that one needs to try to ‘place’ their author before going any farther. If the English language poetry of (almost exactly) the last one hundred years falls into two broad groups – the Non-Poundian and the Post-Poundian – then Duggan belongs to the latter.