AustLit

'There are those who caution against judging a book by its cover. However, were you to pluck Jane Frank’s Wide River from the bookstore shelf, feeling compelled to dive into the marvellous, multi-hued blue river painting on the cover, you would find your choice vindicated by the poetry within. Frank is a poet of endings. Her last lines are replete with meaning, some forming a clever volta, others punching home the point of a poem with the power of a Shakespearean heroic couplet.'  (Introduction)

'In her debut collection, The Beating Heart, Denise O’Hagan takes Father Time as her muse. Timelessness, timeliness, and time-signatures abound in a collection that features O’Hagan’s trademarked musicality. Her poetry is rhythmical and melodic, with rhyme, half-rhyme, alliteration, and assonance her favoured forms of wordplay. O’Hagan has an ear for words that work together to trip off the tongue in pleasing patterns. At times the words waltz across the page; at others, the text clings close to the left-hand margin. Although Father Time may be O’Hagan’s main muse, other family members and their time on Earth – equal to the duration of The Beating Heart of the title – are also focal points of the poems. Mother, grandmother, and infant son are the subjects of several sequences in this engaging collection.' (Introduction)

'Dominique Hecq’s tripartite long poem Kaosmos playfully plays the tape on a loop and spins the record backwards, like a DJ on a mission to mesmerise. Words repeat; phrases resurface; literary allusions abound. It’s an exuberant display.' (Introduction)

'In the brilliant and unsettling Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, Benjamin Dodds takes as his muse a chimpanzee called Lucy. This is a nuanced and complex reimagining of a true story. Lucy is raised as the “daughter” of the Temerlin family for thirteen years as part of a university cross-fostering program. Dr Maurice Temerlin, a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, his wife Jane, a social worker and academic, and their son Steve have their lives upended when they adopt Lucy. Yet, although Lucy is seen as a disruptive and destructive force by the Temerlins’ neighbours and visitors, the reverse is true: it is humans who have derailed her existence irrevocably, with disastrous consequences.'  (Introduction)

'Siarad is a volume of poetry and prose by Caroline Reid, a playwright and repeat finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam. The word “siarad” is Welsh for “to talk; to speak,” and this collection is partly about the idea of the voice as an authentic expression of self. However, as the reader might expect given Reid’s background, Siarad is primarily concerned with the performative nature of speech: speaking as oration, story-weaving, lying, the telling of deeper truths, myth and fable, and siren song. Reid’s poems and short stories are allegorical in their impact: seemingly mundane events are elevated to the symbolic and the sacred.' (Introduction)

'The winner of the 2019 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award, Melinda Bufton’s Moxie is a delightfully dark, wryly observed, feminist-staged corporate takeover of the language of business and commerce. The speaker of the poems is a young woman with more than moxie to recommend her – even through her phases of self-doubt or submission to the company machine, she has chutzpah and inner strength as she rails against the monotony, misogyny, and relentless soul-selling. Of the many threads of meaning in this collection, the most striking is the resurfacing of the imagery of clothing and appearance.'(Introduction)

'Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today is an anthology of poetry and essays edited by the Gomeroi poet and academic Alison Whittaker. It should prove an indispensable addition to the canon of First Nations poetry. This new anthology may take its cue from the seminal work edited by Kevin Gilbert, Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry. Gilbert’s anthology was published in 1988 – the year the country marked its bicentennial of colonial rule with colourful advertisements featuring the jingle, “Celebration of a nation.” One of the aims of the anthology was to disrupt the notion of celebration.'(Introduction)

'The vistas of Rosalee Kiely’s poems in Creature are not landscape paintings. A landscape is usually devoid of animal life – apart from the occasional grazing ungulate if painted in the pastoral mode – and is, by necessity, still: a moment suspended in time. By contrast, Kiely’s poems are teeming with fauna, including that seemingly most perverse of species, homo sapiens. These are lively, life-documenting poems, often darkly comic but sometimes darkly sombre.' (Introduction)

'L.K. Holt’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, Birth Plan, is impressive. If the reader could somehow dive into a gold mine and swim through the layered seams of potential meaning, then that might come close to describing the rich experience of reading Holt’s poetry. This is challenging writing – most readers will require the Oxford English Dictionary on hand to look up some of the more obscure words used – and Holt makes no effort to cosset or cosy up to the reader. This is true both of her use of a precise and formidably vast vocabulary and of her direct approach to sometimes unsettling themes and content.' (Introduction)

'Rebecca Jessen’s debut collection of poetry, Ask Me About the Future, shows this important poet developing an assured voice six years on from the publication of her award-winning verse novel, Gap (2014). Jessen’s is a vital voice in the queersphere. This collection explores the experience of a young gay woman in poignant detail, and there is also a sequence of poems on the birth of her sister’s child which is different in feel: sparser and somehow more organic.' (Introduction)

'Ben Adams’ “a synonym for sobriety” is a recent offering from Friendly Street Poets, who have been enlivening the Adelaide poetry scene since 1975, making them Australia’s longest running community open mic, poetry reading, and publishing group.' (Introduction)

'Felicity Plunkett’s latest collection, A Kinder Sea, renders navigable the ocean of urgent emotions on which a poet floats her many loves and only life. Here, the sea is fluid in its identity – pun intended – as it is at once a sanctuary and a taker of lives, preserving and whittling-away at relics of existence. Sometimes elegiac in nature, these poems are warmly intimate. Yet, in Plunkett’s deft hands, the verse does not succumb to solipsism: she evokes a sense of universal experience as she occasionally samples lines from other writers, including Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Paul Celan, and Ali Smith. The effect is at once fresh and emulatory. The borrowed lines are given new life with Plunkett’s pen – or, to use the words of her poem, “Sound Bridge” (1-2), these are the “same notes in new throats” (2). Plunkett’s poetry offers up prayers, wishes, and promises for the future even as it preserves the past in a way that is less nostalgic or forensic than it is physiological.' (Introduction)

'Jena Woodhouse’s unassuming collection, Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems, reads like a humble offering and happy acceptance of hospitality. The chapbook came about when a representative of Calanthe Collective, a poetry group based on Tamborine Mountain, contacted Woodhouse after finding some of her early poems about the mountain among the late poet Val Vallis’s papers in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland. On many occasions in the 1980s and 1990s, Woodhouse and her family stayed as guests at Vallis’s Tamborine Mountain retreat, Abydos, where she wrote her first poems about this beautiful peak in the Gold Coast Hinterland. As Woodhouse phrases it, when Calanthe offered her this opportunity, “the interrupted dance was able to resume.” This is a lovely metaphor, indicative of the sort of imagery to be found in this book of poetry with its themes of heritage and history, nature and ecology, and hosting and hospitality.' (Introduction)

'Natalie D-Napoleon’s First Blood is a systematic demolition and rebuilding of the construct of girlhood. With an assured hand, D-Napoleon succinctly expresses the seemingly ineffable. Often, her keen stylus writes afresh over and across palimpsestic earlier texts in a processing of erasing, effacing, and replacing. D-Napoleon’s aesthetic is spare but neither sparse nor Spartan, as these poems are servings of selfhood that remain generous even in the face of antagonism.' (Introduction)

'Anna Jacobson’s intriguing collection Amnesia Findings won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize in 2018. In this verse, incorporates many skeins of fine silk like a brocade as the poet deftly handles the varied subject matter of mental illness, family, and Jewish faith and culture. She takes as her muse the concept of passing: passing away, the Passover, and memories of the past. Here are motifs of knitting and needlework, uncovering things buried, and musical expression. Innovative in subject matter and imagery, this collection of poetry pulses with the sensations of a troubled yet brilliant mind. Jacobson maps dreamscapes and pins emotions to corkboard like a nineteenth-century explorer-cum-naturalist seeking the meaning of existence.' (Introduction)

'Leni Shilton’s Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlowis as packed with meaning as the desert landscapes she depicts are teeming with life. This beautifully-realised verse novel tells the story of Strehlow’s life, from meeting and marrying her husband, an explorer and amateur anthropologist and linguist, to their trek through central Australia, to her later life as a teacher.' (Introduction)

'In Vanessa Page’s Tourniquet, the reader enters a realm of shadows and light. Everywhere is heat. When the sun is the star, pun intended, as in the “sex-sweat heat” of the poem “Summer Solstice” (8), nature is all: “lorikeets / arrive like rain” and “Mango trees / wear fruit bling.” When the moon takes the stage in a one-orb show, lovers lie awake “coiling and uncoiling under the skin of python weather” as in the long, languid lines of “Time-share” (12). Like Romeo, the lover must leave first thing in the morning, just as “the night sky is decomposing.”' (Introduction)

'Richard James Allen has always been a generous poet, never miserly with his words and wisdom, so it is fitting that The Short Story of You and I is dedicated, quite simply, “for you.” Most of the poems are written in the first or second person. An abiding sense of inclusivity is achieved and so the poetry is a delight to read in a time that seems so divisive: an era of insta-hate and antisocial media, refugees banished to remote islands, and walls erected. An antidote is offered in Allen’s work – although the reader should be warned that this draught may really be a sleeping potion.' (Introduction)

'In third body, Marion May Campbell interrogates the porous boundaries between the self and the other, as well as the incongruous inconsistencies between the self and the self. Thus, in “incipient foredune” (71-89), “our devastating need / to kill the other in each other” is seen to be “murder of all desire” (83). As lovers, we so often want everything in the beloved that we are not, and yet we so often seek only to see ourselves in the other. The bonds that bind us together may become restrictive. In the opening poem, “passing” (3-12), the speaker asks: “what kind of history / & what kind of witness / is possible / when Inever coincides with me” (5)? If Iis the acting first person subject, then meis the first person object acted on: it is the difference between perpetrator and victim, saviour and saved, or leader and follower. Campbell negotiates such binaries with finesse, showing an astounding gift for figurative language.' (Introduction)