AustLit

'This collection of poems is charged with electric musicality, full like a glass at a wedding or a wake – and the cover equates the human being, arms extended, with a chalice which evokes the human spirit itself. The elixir this work contains is spiked with anger and despair, but it also shimmers with exuberance, and the draught it offers is addictive. Anne Casey’s work opens up issues of war, of degradation, of disrespect, covetousness and harassment, which drain us of hope, and dignity. She shows that the compulsive reaching and releasing which shapes our lives makes us weigh the cost of our human greed and grasping materialism, and leaves us empty in a world which was given to us in an abundant condition. Yet from that emptiness, and in our drained state, we must still generate the will to live, the energy to surge, to rise and renew ourselves. '  (Publication summary)

'I always get the sense after reading his poetry that Richard James Allen must thrive on human connection. In this latest anthology, a poem could be short as the line of a single sentence (excluding the title for it) or long and potentially unwieldy, filling 17 pages with concepts and riffs far more complex, yet entreating the listener/reader to persist with the seemingly one-sided conversation. I last reviewed Allen’s Fixing the Broken Nightingale (2014) and, upon embarking the reading of this new collection, I was reminded repeatedly about what I enjoy and value in his writing – an ever-deepening gift and capacity to bring together words, phrases, pauses, gaps, alignments, mal-alignments and punctuations that trigger our senses, our memories, our consciences and our consciousness with things we know (which we had forgotten) and things we didn’t know that could be known.' (Introduction) 

'Some of us are fortunate to have experienced those places where nature awakens us to become its disciple. A pause on a mountain top or a walk in a rain forest compels us to contemplate our humanity. However to write about this experience without undertones of politics nor activism, rather with precise lyric and evocative tone is what Jena Woodhouse has undoubtedly achieved in her most recent poetry collection, Green Dance. Through her lens, she amplifies the micro of our natural world in such a way where you can’t help but cherish, wonder and want to protect what we have left.' (Introduction)

'I first saw — though not met — Fiona in the early 1990s at a premier’s literary awards, when her book Cardboard received a prize. At the awards the minister for the arts, Peter Collins, announced that Fiona would not appear to fetch her prize given the sad fact that her mother had just died. However, someone whispered in his ear that Fiona indeed was there to receive her prize, and so she stepped up to the stage.'(Introduction)

'I frequently begin a launch speech by saying something about my connection with the launchee. This occasion will be no exception. However, there is a slight question-mark as to when exactly Earl Livings and I first met. We seem to agree that it must have happened at the poetry readings in the Lower Town Hall at Hawthorn, which we both attended from the late 1980s into the mid ’90s. We even did a live three-way collaboration there with the composer Roger Alsop in an event featuring some of our poetry set to music in electronic, computer-generated form! So this poet and I do go back a fair way.' (Introduction)

'I could start with a cheap headline: SLAMMER GOES LEGIT. and think of another cheap headline: DESK-POET TAKES CROWD-BATH that might fit me if I turned up at a performance venue. Like most cheap headlines they are crass and wrong-headed. Tug always had a good grasp of poetic tradition, popular and more scholarly, which were never mutually exclusive. For my part, I was always happy to take a “crowd-bath” to find a new audience and I like to read my work aloud and sometimes memorise the pieces.' (Introduction)