AustLit

'Jennifer Maiden’s first books, Tactics (1974) and The Problem of Evil (1975), introduced a fantastically complex and enquiring poetry, with strangely fragmentary assemblages of character wrought from conflict. Both books were partly inspired by television’s gory nightly footage of the Vietnam War. While much poetry in the 1970s was of seditiously unvarnished protest, Maiden’s was intricate and stylised, poems toppling with moral dilemmas and extraordinary images, or restrained in pure lyricism such as ‘The Windward Side’: ‘The island has a windward side / walkless long and crossless wide / & winds across the cliff-face ride: / a woman’s face / caved in with pride / that craves for every blow.’ (Introduction)

'Rae Desmond Jones has stated that for him poetry and politics are mutually contradictory pursuits, yet his poetry, concerned with how people and classes interact, is, like all art, necessarily political. Poems explore, often comically, types of capital, and its deployment of power, from the cruising ‘sharks’ in the street menacing bypassers, to teacher-student relationships finally pushed into hatred: ‘the room constricts us all / i almost say get out / go back to your DVDs & your hopeless dreams: / be unemployable… let there be war between us’ (‘Decline and fall’). Jones limns a dichotomy between the powerful and the powerless, fumigating, and sometimes almost deifying, its ambiguity and irresolvability.'  (Introduction)

'On the door of Grái Kötturinn cafe is the painted face of a grey cat with green eyes. It grins awkwardly, its crooked white whiskers etched into the paint in thin lines like scratches. Although I had my eye out for the Grái Kötturinn, I almost missed it as I walked down Hverfisgata, the street which runs parallel to the harbour shoreline of Reykjavík. Seeing the painted grey cat, I open the red door and enter the cafe, a small room partitioned by bookshelves.' (Introduction)