AustLit

''Dan Disney's accelerations & inertias is a remarkable work of self-critiquing, inverting hybridity. This is a restive book in which new skyscrapers and museums, temples and consumer fetishism are complementary, and not necessarily in tension. In these ‘distillations’ there is no quietism, and the ‘museum of the future’ is a question with fear and doubt in the air about it. The key to this work – the best of Disney’s, I think – remains the critique of a crisis of capital, a deep respect for environment, a deep respect for culture and its complexities, a wonder mixed with a toughness of observation and understanding of what being an observer means.'' (Publication summary)

'John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist project, Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws (and lore) to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends.' (Publication abstract)

'THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only example of the form dating from t he Renaissance, though as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.) notes, it was Théodore de Banville’s “popular handbook Petit traité de poésie française, [that gave rise to] the mistaken belief that the villanelle was an antique form,” a belief that “persisted tenaciously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” In some contexts, the misapprehension persists: see, for example, the claims made on Poetica, aired regularly until somewhat recently on Australia’s national broadcast network: “The villanelle was embraced by the musician-poets of twelfth-century France; the troubadours of Provençal and the trouvères of the north, but its origin is Italian.”' (Introduction)

'Laurie Duggan has long been a star within the light-filled firmaments of Australian poetry that first burst into prominence around five decades ago. A so-called ‘Monash poet’, Duggan’s recently published Selected Poems is suffused with images in which he trains an unrelentingly quizzical, reverent eye across apparently mundane terrains...' (Introduction)

'In this ever-necessary fight, here is a poet showing how the discourse of indigeneity must never be brought into the ideological service of epistemic whitework, nor simply subsumed by politically expedient gestures (a clear reference to then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's generations-late apology to indigenous peoples, made in 2008). [...]this book asserts a fastidious impulse and in that invaded, sheep-infested, bleating antipodean place of "nullius men" calling "oi there / boong-y slut-bra line legging line spaghetti strap / oi there!", the tone remains aggressively elegiac, the styles always experimentally transgressive. Perhaps this book is a key to portals opening onto precolonial symbolic orders; or perhaps, in that land of traumascapes, Whittaker's syntactical interventions seek to commune with genocidal pasts and beyond while simultaneously calling ahead into the future.'  (Introduction)

'Part unauthorized biography, part Miltonic character study, and part examination of what it is that makes us hominids of the sapiens order tick, the first section of Petra White's new collection, Reading for a Quiet Morning, casts an oracular, topological gaze across a place of outposts imagining themselves toward stabilities. In "How the Temple Was Built," the poet imagines a milieu of flat domains propped up by "handmade gods / vivid as puppets held up to the burning sun" (4) and acutely understands metaphysics as an ur-discourse straightening mayhem into particular directions...' (Introduction)

(i) the chora and the semiotic order: Euclid's dog as exile-text?

'Jordie Albiston's Euclid's dog (2017) sets up formally experimental textual spaces into which the poet channels sublime affective arrivals. Perhaps this book of `too algorithmic poems' functions as a kind of geomancy, for indeed Euclid's dog `crack[s] ajar those tiny heavens' of connection and completion (8), and the book's great power lies in Albiston using form as a divining tool by which to explore apprehensions of an extralinguistic 'heavenly rush' (30). The eight forms in this collection emulate those cosmic physical structures first mapped in Elements, Euclid's utext, in which the ancient Greek writer establishes geometry as a branch of mathematics concerned with the commensurable properties of three-dimensional space. In Euclid's dog, Albiston treats language as a kind of architectonic material and, turning her attention towards topographies of incommensurable affect, bends her forms into metrically stabilised, computational functions. The result is no mere domestication; Albiston's chiming metaphysics finally recounts love as a wild and profoundly generative creative force.  (Introduction)

'Deriving from the Ancient Greek etymons eidos ('form') and eido ('to see'), the modern term `'eidolon' transmutes into English in two interconnected ways: an eidolon can either be an idealised person or thing, or a spectre or phantom. In poetry, the term is often associated with Walt Whitman's poem of the same name, included in his 'Inscriptions' section of the 1881-82 edition of Leaves of Grass. In this apocryphal text, stanzas repeatedly conclude on the word 'eidolon' as if the repetitions are one means (semantic satiation) by which to challenge connections between signified and signifier. The American transcendentalist's poem offers 'a theory ; about  how a poet should handle, or mediate, form and materiality' Cohen 1), and the eidolon  remains paradoxical for Whitman, a 'spiritual image of the immatrerial' of which 'seeks to demonstrate the incompleteness of our understanding of reality' (Richardson 201)...' (Introduction)