catalogue Jordie Albiston: Vertigo (a cantata) Jordie Albiston: the sonnet according to 'm' Catherine Bateson: Marriage for Beginners Vincent Buckley: Collected Poems Elizabeth Campbell: Letters to the Tremulous Hand John Jenkins: Growing up with Mr Menzies Aileen Kelly: The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983-2006 Marcella Polain: Therapy Like Fish Peter Steele: White Knight with Beebox Petra White: The Incoming Tide Petra White: The Simplified World
ISBN: 0 9775787 3 9
Julian Croft’s imaginative territory will be familiar to many from his earlier collections of poetry – a swathe of the NSW coast and hinterland, and its people. The intensity of the meditation of self into society and place feels new. Julian Croft grew up in Newcastle, NSW, where he was born in 1941. After graduating from the university there, he spent the late 1960s in Europe and Africa, and taught at the University of Sierra Leone, 1968–70. Since then he has lived in Armidale in northern NSW, where he was a teacher of literature at the University of New England until recently. He has been publishing poems since 1962. His first collection, Breakfasts in Shanghai (A&R, 1984) was the Asia/Pacific winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. A&R published his novel, Their Solitary Way, in 1985, and a second book of poems, Confessions of a Corinthian, in 1991. From Martin Duwell, Australian Book Review, May 2007, p.48: ‘Julian Croft, born in 1941, is a poet whose work deserves a wider audience. This new work, Ocean Island, is by far the best … Devourer-of-life and writer-on-sand are two images of the poet, but Croft’s poetry suggests there are many more.’ From Felicity Plunkett, Cordite, www.cordite.org.au:
From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm This is a poet who knows what he's looking at, and how to see. And in 'Making hay' he discusses the point of poetry, of: the poet not as seer or prophet To my mind, this is the coda of the whole collection - that poetry provides us a way of seeing all the made world as symbol. I have read a few reviews of this collection, and most point the reader to the truly marvellous 'After a war (any war)' - which I too recommend. For me, though, his awareness of the workplace is the most trenchant aspect that informs this collection, and a whole world is opened up by, for instance, 'Dockyard': Mother's sewing room but run by men. The factory might resemble a sewing room, but the domestic imagery fades as the poem unfolds, and we see that really, it is a 'rough beast, its hour come round at last'.
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ISBN: 0 9775787 0 4 These poems are spare, in the tradition of imagism, from haiku through to surrealism and since; and they are oblique, worked between logic and illogic.
Claire Gaskin was born in 1966 and lives with her two teenage daughters in Melbourne. She has also lived in country Victoria, most recently in Mansfield. Her jobs have included housecleaner, and integration aide to autistic children. She is a yoga teacher, has taught literature-and-writing classes for eighteen years, and has been publishing her poetry in literary journals since 1985. Shortlisted for the 2008 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature, John Bray Prize. Judges' comments: 'This is an exceptional first book. Clare Gaskin's poetry is eloquent and attentive, bright with striking and precise images, yet has a darker undercurrent acknowledging absence and pain. She writes, often obliquely, of the elemental and the transient - children, flowers, cats, clouds, rain, birds, dreams, leaves and wind. Her spare, disciplined structures stringently contain and intensify the emotions evoked, and her sculpted style can make of a poem an almost tangible object of beauty.' From Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review, March 2007, p.64: ‘In Gaskin's long-awaited, first substantial book . . . [is] a partly surrealist mysticism, where observation precedes meaning – “the flywire cuts the sky into tiny squares. // in answer to your question there is none. // in answer to the fall is the ground”. . . Gaskin’s poems replicate the slipperiness of sensation and feeling, rarely with any overt continuous commentary; rather, they are often pointillist tics of images, often metaphor, forming matter as they progress . . . . A Bud is shaped around repeated talismanic words, particularly "earth", "air-wind-breath", "fire-flame", "water-river", and many images and words repeat in different poems to create a reflexive continuity from these basic elements.’ From Chris Grierson, Readings Monthly, December 2006, p.5: ‘Book of the year? Poetry of course! Claire Gaskin’s A Bud. I’ve always held the view that her imagist poetry is some of the finest writing in this country full-stop. Like haiku at its best, it’s beautiful, skewed and chillingly spare.’ From Gregory A Gould, Text Journal, October 2008, www.textjournal.com.au:
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Aileen Kelly: The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983-2006 ISBN: 0 9775787 2 0 From David Gilbey, Australian Book Review, April 2007: 'The Passion Paintings collects a writing life of poetry: some seventy pages of new poems, "Book Three", grafted onto Kelly’s Mary Gilmore Award-winning first volume Coming Up For Light, and City and Stranger. It is a rich feast of concentrated flavours and conceptual challenges – a book with multiple layers of satisfaction . . . using crafty language to focus on relationships and meaningfulness. . . . The book is itself a brilliant triptych . . . the individual poems focusing on moments, conversations, and individuals whose lives and imaginings instantiate the intersection between secular and sacred in the contemporary world.' From Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 91:
From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm, 2008:
for sample poems click hereDarkness rises and I strike it down back to top
ISBN: 0 9775787 1 2
Paul Magee was born in 1970 and grew up in Melbourne. A scholar in classical languages, Russian and the philosophy of history, he spent his twenties between study, overseas travel and work as a freelance Latin tutor. The University of Illinois Press published his prose study of travel, From Here to Tierra del Fuego, in 2000. He is a lecturer in creative reading at the University of Canberra. Shortlisted for the 2008 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature, Award for Innovation. Judges' comments: 'This collection of poetry is in 11 loosely sequenced sections, each containing a fresh translation of a major Latin poet. The book is a disarming combination of poetic invention, literary pastiche and original translation. Magee invites the reader to explore metaphorical connections and implicit narrative movements, in no fixed order, but with the promise of a rich encounter with the literary heritage of the west.' From Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review, March 2007, p.64: ‘Paul Magee's first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life . . . his fragmented, deracinated modern life [is] apparent in the various styles he employs, from the explanatory and prose-like to the chopped expostulations of love or lament. Magee, by most unusually dividing Cube Root of Book into eleven chapters, pleads for the sort of reading given to the epic poems. Each chapter draws an arc of discovery. . . . Magee's stormy, haunted effusions rush through places and scenes of sorrow or inspiration . . . . Fascination with language catapults this book. There is also awareness that art is a desperate attempt to revivify, and that words are an approximation: "Shall I compare thee to a Shakespearean sonnet? / The rain forms beads on a cosmetic cheek."’ From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm, 2008: To perform a cube root on a book: what would that operation reveal? Perhaps, poems by the ancients, the place where we all began, where writing was born. Perhaps, the origins of verse. In this collection, interspersed among the twentieth/twenty-first century poems, one in each of the 11 sections, is a poem by a Latin poet, translated by Magee into a voice that makes it evident that people haven't changed very much, that we still feel, fear, desire, yearn, resent, just as people did 2000 years ago. Listen to this bit, from the Aeneid:But when Palamedes was struck by the envy of that two-faceHow's that for vernacular! for sample poems click hereBut what else is leftBut the poems are also given to contesting power. See how Magee takes on the previous government, for example, in 'for a prime minister (Philippic II)': back to top
Jordie Albiston: Vertigo (a cantata) Jordie Albiston’s poetry is known for its rhythmic power, buoying a sharp and often dark intelligence. Vertigo invokes her background in music, using elastically spaced bar-lines to punctuate its energetic cadences. And, modelled like a cantata, it lays out something of music’s paradox – emotional intensity flashing from formal composure.
Jordie Albiston lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1961. Two of her poetry books (Botany Bay Document, 1996 – retitled Dreaming Transportation and The Hanging of Jean Lee, 1998) have been adapted by the composer Andrée Greenwell for music-theatre: both enjoyed seasons at the Sydney Opera House. Nervous Arcs won the Mary Gilmore Award for a first book of Australian poetry in 1995, and was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize. Albiston’s fourth collection, The Fall (2003), was shortlisted for Premier’s Prizes in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. She holds a PhD in literature. From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm, 2008:
I suspect it is the cantata form, along with Albiston's writing and humour, that prevent it from becoming a drag. In 'Anacrusis', for instance, the poetic persona is running checks of herself in a way that could, without the wry sensibility, be just too damn sad: heartbeat head screwed on right way round check I don't know about you, but it made me laugh. Read it out loud, and listen to the patterns of consonants and verbs, stressed and unstressed syllables: despite the quotidian voice in this part, it is a highly musical book. Cantata is, of course, from the Italian to sing, and a cantata is a vocal composition. In its early days it was typically for only one or two voices, so Albiston's work returns it to its roots. From Heather Taylor Johnson, Cordite, May 2008: ‘One might think a collection devoted entirely to a break-up could become tedious or lamentably repetitive, but Jordie Albiston ensures that each poem in Vertigo: a cantata has a unique vibrancy and separate tone. This is a book one can read again and again, since so much of it resonates with a universal experience of love and loss. But a personal identification with the book’s themes would not be the only thing compelling this reviewer’s return to this something-like-a-verse-novel collection; I also find its lyricism stirring. She also repeats the same motif or phrase throughout the collection; ‘the good trees’, for example, pops up many times. This repetition works not only to suggest a common stability in our world but to also represent a private, structured madness. Anyone who has ever dealt with a tragedy, be it large or small, can probably understand how this dichotomy can work. Albiston is clearly attuned. . . I could find very little wrong with Vertigo: a cantata, as may be expected of Jordie Albiston, a prize winning poet, and this being her fifth collection in twelve years. The book is highly communicative on a level with which most will have the ability to connect (who hasn’t been hurt by the dissolution of a love?) and so it should be gobbled up by the masses. But it is due to Albiston’s finely tuned ear and dexterous hand, her insight into the workings of the spoken and written language, and their compatibilities with music, that the book should be praised by the critics.’ From David McCooey, Australian Book Review, October 2007, p.48: ‘Vertigo occupies the paradoxical space that powerful writing often does. It authoritatively images the loss of power; it evokes romance while seeking realist effects; it seeks the universal through the individual. In particular, it finds a way of expressing the most powerful emotions through the most restrictive of forms. The collection also works because of its lack of solemnity. There is much humour here. . . . The arc of the work is, appropriately for a musical work, partly circular, but it is also - as seen in the choruses, with their emphasis on praise and biblical analogues - a kind of redemption. But as the extraordinary final lines of “Finale” show, this process is not facile, but hard-won, “sung down the dark / years”. . . . If she hasn’t already, Jordie Albiston has shown herself to be a poet of the first order.’ Angela Gardner, foam:e, issue 6, http://www.foame.org/index.html: Albiston handles her subject deftly, using both heightened language alongside the everyday to great effect. […] At all times this heightened language is kept under tight control allowing the work to use an incredible emotional breadth of language. [T]he breath, and therefore voice and meaning, is superbly crafted.
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Petra White: The Incoming Tide
Thinking – joyous and sly – is the mark of these poems by Petra White. Petra White was born in 1975 in Adelaide and grew up there. She moved to Melbourne in 1998, after some feral time travelling around Australia. A graduate in German and English literature from the University of Melbourne, she has held jobs in publishing, college tutoring, and as a policy officer. The IncomingTide is her first collection. Shortlisted for Judith Wright Calanthe Prize 2007. Judges' comments: 'This is a stunning first book by a poet who has bypassed the usual hallmarks of a "young writer" and emerged with a fully formed voice and startling ease of style. Petra White's book eschews the seductions of self-referentiality and language games. She is present in all her poems, but deeply integrated, her concern being to connect with others and the environment with unfailing intelligence, ironic humour, originality of image and acute observation.' From Martin Duwell, http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/0709white.htm ‘This is a very accomplished and very complex first book by a poet who can be said to be, already, of considerable importance.’From Andrew Sant, Australian Book Review, October 2007, p.47: ‘ “Munich” is a poem of considerable poise, dignity, tenderness and technical accomplishment. . . . Surprises and pleasures abound. It is not attention-seeking poetry that endeavours to collar the reader; rather, it elicits attention via its radiant intelligence and unpredictable wit.’ From Geoff Page, The Canberra Times, October 13 2007:
From Lyn McCredden, The Age, Saturday July 5, 2008: ‘One way to describe the cumulative effect of her poems is to say that you learn, as you read, to trust deeply this voice and the emotional richness that reveals itself to you slowly, steadily and uncompromisingly. From Heather Taylor Johnson, Wet Ink, Issue 11, 2008: ‘The twelve part ‘Highway’ is nothing short of brilliant. The poems inside the larger poem map a trail of the Eyre Highway and the outcome is a collage of stark images, lingering sensations and arresting memories. Again this feels like an other world shaped by the poet and so it seems almost mythical, entirely imagined. Yet what I ultimately got out ‘Highway’ was a strong sense of appreciation that could only have been lived and felt. From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm , 2008: This is a lovely collection of poems: alive in every line, finely honed, full of close observations. Listen to these lines (from 'Bunda cliffs'):for sample poems click hereThe shelved-in sea hived with diagonals,You need to say the lines out loud, feel the words and their patterns of vowel and consonant on your tongue. This is a poet who is not afraid: she uses words like 'diagonals' without turning a hair; she uses 'axolotl', such an awkward term, in a poem that is a paean to sisterhood; and though there is no sense of the sibling relationship through most of the poem, at the end it falls into place: back to top
LK Holt: Man Wolf Man LK Holt’s poems are stories, and eruptions from the midst of story. They are also pure lyric. A feeling for the formality of language guides her lines through a music of rhyme, half-rhyme (and quarter-rhyme) and turns found images of this world into blazon.
LK Holt lives in Melbourne where she was born in 1982. Her childhood and growing up were mainly spent in Adelaide. She is a graduate in History from the University of Melbourne. Man Wolf Man is her first full-length collection. From the Judges' Comments, 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize, NSW Premiers Awards (winner): LK Holt’s Man Wolf Man is a wonderful example of the power of the lyric to slow time down to intense, expanded moments of seeing and feeling. In measured poems of decorum and grace, Holt weighs beauty against terror, art against the unspeakable, love against death. The exquisite music of these poems comes from a perfect mastery of form that is never content merely to deploy traditional templates like the sonnet or the sestina, but converts them into something that is contemporary, arresting, and Holt’s own.
From Maria Takolander, Australian Book Review, May 2008:
From Gus Goswell, Cordite Poetry Review, June 2008:
From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm, 2008: LK Holt's Man wolf man is a highly visual, highly intelligent collection. Like many products of young contemporary artists, it shows its erudition. Holt's work also offers some lovely evocations of traditional poetry and Australian imagery. Read, for example, about 'Two women', who: From Kathryn Hind, Text Journal, October 2008, www.textjournal.com.au:
From The Age, 'Favourite Literary Encounters of the Year', December 13 2008:
From David Kelly, Famous Reporter, issue 39, 2009: [Man Wolf Man is] accomplished, riotous, and glittering. [...] For me, poetry should be interesting. have meaning (just a personal quirk of mine) and a quality some may call music or rhythm or fluency. The long sequence 'Unfinished Confession' tick all the above boxes. It concerns operations called orchidectomies but the fact that the word 'orchidectomist' can be used in such a casual, everyday manner in a poem that floats on its fluency is a testament to something like a good ear and a capacity up there with CK Williams... From Stephen Lawrence, Wet Ink, Issue 12, 2008: for sample poems click here back to top
Elizabeth Campbell: Letters to the Tremulous Hand Elizabeth Campbell’s poems always seem daimonic, running along an edge of surprise. They are in fact written very slowly, sculpted to a dense inner clarity. It helps that she is a master of the rhythms of free-verse lines, their questings, turns, and landings.
Elizabeth Campbell lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1980. Much of her youth was spent with horses, in the bush of the Yarra Ranges. She still keeps a horse. A graduate in English and History, she spent several years as, variously, florist, actor, singer, shopgirl, horseriding instructor, waiter and European traveller. Since 2006 she has taught English at Eltham High School. Letters to the Tremulous Hand is her first collection. From Maria Takolander, Australian Book Review, May 2008:
From Gus Goswell, Cordite Poetry Review, June 2008:
From Robert Adamson, The Age, ‘Favourite Literary Encounters of the Year’. December 13 2008:
From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm, 2008: 'The book [contains] intelligent, observant pieces that make me think of one of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's definitions of the form: 'Poetry should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown' (Ferlinghetti 2000). Her many horse poems gesture in this direction, such as these lines:Horses are never wrong. In these small lines Campbell conjures up the essential otherness of the horse who, unlike us, lives outside representation and ethics, right or wrong, yes or no. From Sandra Burr, Text Journal, October 2008, www.textjournal.com.au: [In] Campbell’s horse poems there is something much darker, deeper, more confronting and appalling here than conventional horse love. Horses seem to be a locus of loss and longing for Campbell. Her grief at what she sees as the unbridgeable divide between humans and horses is expressed in ‘Recurring’ when she says of her runaway mare: ‘she doesn’t need that love/ and you couldn’t take her weight.
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Jan Owen: Poems 1980-2008
This retrospective by Jan Owen includes a majority of the poems from her first five volumes, with some revisions. Gathered with them is a book-length collection of new poetry, Laughing in Greek. A large and intricate world is on display, present in capsule on page 1 in 'First Love'. This poem sets going a motif of the airy light and shadow cast by memory of adult and childhood relationships. It also raises the lure of knowledge: Owen's verse is infused with the sciences, and with art, philosophy and history. Her interest is the world itself, and the words for it. When she writes a poem that dwells on a place or a painting - or a memory - it is not as a tourist impressionist but as a thinker and precise sensualist. Jan Owen has a command of wit and tone across a wide range of verse techniques, both formal and free. She moves easily between plain, oblique and surreal. Some of the new poems seem glowing labyrinths of thinking and language - led through by a wonderful clarity of voice and rhythm. Jan Owen was born in Adelaide in 1940, and lives nearby at Aldinga Beach. She has worked as a librarian, editor and teacher and has been a writer in residence in Venice, Rome, Paris and Malaysia. Awards for her poetry include the Mary Gilmore Prize, the Anne Elder Award, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the Gwen Harwood Prize and the Max Harris Award. Her fifth collection Timedancing (2002) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the John Bray National Poetry Prize. From David Gilbey, ABR, October 2008: ‘This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopaedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language. Angels and spirits inhabit and shadow Poems 1980–2008. It is part of how Owen reads the world: as a lab assistant, librarian and poet: analyse, catalogue, invest in language. Being is permeable, and Owen’s poetry conjures and connects across dimensions. Owen writes with delicacy and strength, passion and intellect, in formal and free modes (see her delight in the sonnet form). John Leonard Press is to be congratulated for publishing yet another high quality and imaginatively satisfying collection.’ From Penelope Nelson, Quadrant, September 2008:
Owen’s poems work their magic with quiet assurance. She has a dazzling, underrated talent. There are no grand narratives, no victim personae, no fanfares. Instead there are shimmering memories, fleeting encounters, caught moments, perfect pitch and seamless craftsmanship. And has anyone ever written a better poem about an echidna? “At my step he’s aquiver, horripilous, digging in all stop-start as if in doubt ...” The stock response to “How do echidnas make love?” is “Very carefully.” Jan Owen’s answer is both wittier and more poetic. Many poems flirt with cosmology and quantum physics when essaying the ineffable. This is dangerous territory for anyone who lacks Owen’s delicate touch, but in her hands scientific metaphors of time and light partner well with intuition. “What god of the unlikely gets us here?” she demands in “Travelling Towards the Evidence”, an ambitious poem that traverses beauty, evil and the search for understanding, while almost settling for “the elliptical travelling-on”. There is nothing superfluous in Jan Owen’s poetry: no flowery runs of description, even when she writes about flowers, as she does in Laughing in Greek. Poised, polished and apparently simple, her work is more profound than it may appear. This book is a fine achievement.' From Marie-Andree Lamontage, La Traductiere, No. 26, June 2008: Owen sets herself to evoke moments which are special, indeed numinous, where the real and the banal are transfigured and take on what one could call an opaque transparency. . . . The opacity of these scenes stems from the important part played by chance, the existence of mysterious links between beings and things, the feeling that all this is not simply perceived but created by the perception. . . . From Martin Duwell, http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/0808owen.htm , August 2008: Jan Owen is one of those poets who becomes progressively more interesting not because the quality of the work improves radically or because they write a breakthrough work, but because it takes a number of books before readers can see the outlines of her distinctive imagination. Such a situation is an ideal one for the publication of a selected poems such as this. It is built out of generous (and, as far as I can see, well-chosen) selections from her first five books and contains a book length new work, Laughing in Greek. Reading it enables us to see how restlessly Owen’s poems move internally from the microscopic to the cosmic; from the present to the past (and vice versa); from the local to the exotic; from the abstract to the embodied and from the act of representing to the act of meditating. Given this restlessness it is no surprise that the poems are interested in rooms, horizons and frames – all things that must be crossed or exited when one of these shifts is made. For a critic it is nice to be able to say that much of this can be found, inchoate, in her first book, Boy With A Telescope, published in 1986. The very first poem, “First Love”, describes an adolescent falling in love with a Titian, or rather, the subject of the Titian, when she should have been attending to lessons on Archimedes’ principle: the result is “a D in Physics”. It is a poem about art and reality but also about the frames that mark them out. When, Ten years later I married:the young Englishman of the painting has stepped out of the frame into reality. And when, in “The Riding Habit”, a painting of a tailor is used as the basis for an imaginative filling out of the relationship between a noblewoman and her tailor, what is this but the author reversing the process by entering through the frame into the picture and describing those components that we cannot see? From Angela Rockel, Famous Reporter, No. 38, December 2008: The final collection, Laughing in Greek, begins a new phase in Owen’s project, turning to the language-matrix which organises consciousness and from which the poetic voice and the events it recognises both arise. Problems inherent in language/art are identified, beginning with the way it ‘fixes’ what it formulates in the process of embodying ideas. The more powerful the image, the more resistance it creates to subsequent thought-forms and to interpretations of meaning that are adequate to later experience. The act of bringing something into being in language/art displaces that which is not-yet-thought: Abruptly held at bay by metaphor,/that masked guardian of the ante-room,/tomorrow’s tenants try to stake their claim –/concepts craving life, they find no door://You are simply one of us in denser form!/they tell the latest metaphor – the sign/NOT IN on the wall of thought … (‘Ante-room’)In the long poem ‘Travelling Towards the Evidence’, Owen examines this role of metaphor in determining which events and experiences are recognised as meaningful and how they will be interpreted. Widening her reflection on origins, this time Owen identifies not family but culture, understood as the product of a system of metaphors, as that which determines how meaning will be assigned:We start with nothing/but darkness older than bone//and a couple of leftover maps,/some purpose lighting us down…/ Down onto loose sand/where another man’s creed/may be your grit in the craw,//or glimpsiest chiffons of God/bankrupting the one you were./Neptune sextile Pluto sets its seed/as prayer’s cross-section –// a star-fruit, say, or the pomegranate’s/packed congregation./A flower will open on sheer fall,/says Anna Mezzanotte, ironing lace.//We travel towards such evidence/trace by trace,/backwards, with our luggage/of lessening light … (‘Travelling Towards the Evidence’)Each of us, the poem suggests, labours to bring forth our own nuanced understanding of the world, always in hindsight, through experiences that are of necessity directed by the cultural ‘maps’ we inherit. Writing/reading is a vitally important part of the process of updating the maps, since language is all we have to articulate the next necessary thought that may steer us away from wreckage and towards the mindfulness that is our only hope. Jan Owen is a traveller who brings news of places where the maps have failed, and her precisely-imaged and cogently-thought poems create breathing space for us all. Poems 1980–2008 is a landmark. From Peter Kenneally, The Age, November 29, 2008:
From Lisa Wilde, American Book Review, 30(2), February 2009:
the light bleeds silver on water; At this point the poem [‘Seascape with Young Girl’] is almost breathing on its own, making the leap from a literal moment to a place in the realm of human feeling. This quality—slowing down and deepening time—is what many of Owen’s poems achieve. From Susan Healy, The Poetry and Poetics Centre Reviews Page, April 2009, http://poetryandpoeticscentre.com/index.php/Recent_Australian_Poetry_Reviews:
From Robert Lumsden, The Adelaide Review, October 2008:
From Shane McCauley, Indigo, Summer 2010:
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Peter Steele: White Knight with Beebox
This collection begins with 82 pages of new poems, then follows back through a rich selection from Peter Steele's earlier books. Two volumes of poems on artworks are represented by ones that retain their power separately from illustration. He is a respected poet mainly by repute and glimpses: this gathering shows one of our best, in skill and scope. A worker in traditional forms, he early on perfected his own stress metre, unrhymed and alternating five and four beats -- a flexible and driving rhythm for wit and sustained, passionate thinking in the classical tradition of the ode. The effortless range of historical detail is liberating. It plays to our curiosity with references swept in quickly and lightly, turning to precise image as they arrive. Steele has written of poetry's need for 'finger-tip control . . . it is always delicacy that delivers the goods'. Just as striking is the emotional range, dark to light. The new sequence 'A Mass for Anglesea', framed after that ceremony, is a kind of essay, variously lyrical and mordant, in the modes and tones of joy and grief. Steele's poems, constantly energetic, open as constantly to stillness. Peter Steele was born in Perth in 1939 and grew up there. He moved to Melbourne in 1957 to join the Jesuits, and has been of their company ever since. Most of his life has been spent teaching and writing at The University of Melbourne, of which he is a Professor Emeritus. Repeated visits to universities in Chicago, New York, and Washington DC have stimulated his imagination, and he is grateful for the company and example of poets, whether younger of older than himself. Aside from poetry, he has written books on Swift, on Peter Porter, on modern poets, and on the arts of autobiography; also homilies, and a good deal to do with the hinterland between imagination and belief. From Paul Hetherington, Australian Book Review, November 2008: There are times when I read a book that reinvigorates important questions for me – such as how language carries and creates meaning, and what, after all, is the function and force of poetry. Usually, such a book is a creative work, and I like to imagine that the first readers of volumes by George Herbert or John Donne responded with such questions – to poetry that consistently registered a persuasive complexity and which, while emotionally restrained, carried a pithy emotional charge. From Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review, October 2008: “Credo” begins with a large perspective on history and the cosmos and then switches very beautifully to the local by engaging with a truck driver on the forecourt of the service station. As he drives through the stands of eucalypts he becomes a kind of wood-man and the poem then transitions to Jesus (“the other traveller, working his passage / from boy to man, country to city, / sawyer’s horse to the bloody work on a pole”). This is all wonderfully done, seamlessly producing a poem that is as well-made as a fine piece of wooden furniture. It is worth dwelling for a while on this element of Steele’s technique: many of the poems are driven by transitions or disjunctions which are announced in the language of argument or by a demotic turn of phrase. Finally, though not the last poem of the group, “Offerings” is a wonderful celebration of human creativity beginning (with the customary wide perspective) with the cave painters of Lascaux, and including Neolithic flint blades and Chinese oracle bones and coffin-handles. The final stanza surprisingly but very satisfyingly moves not only towards names but towards the tactile experience of the words themselves – something a poet is especially sensitive to but which everybody can relate to. And the method of the poem is not argument or analysis but listing: And blessed are you who fit us all for naming - Just as the priest can bless the host so the poet can bless language (itself mysteriously connected to the word, or Word). From Philip Harvey, Eureka Street Vol 18 No 23, 2008: It is always good to come back into the steadying orbit of a Steele poem, what with so much dark energy and dodgy Plutos moving about. This selection shows what a consistent object the Steele poem is, and just as we view the universe backward in time from today, so the book starts with the most recent illuminations then works back to beginnings. From Chris Wallace-Crabbe, The Age, ‘Favourite Literary Encounters of the Year’. December 13 2008:
From Peter Kenneally, The Age, November 29, 2008: At times Steele seems like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days: up to his neck in culture and history, all his life in his eyes, singing and declaiming to the world in general and God in particular. From Andrew Hamilton, Madonna, November/December 2008:
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Marcella Polain: Therapy Like Fish ISBN: 9780977578795
A full-length book of new poems by Marcella Polain opens this volume and provides its overall title. Two further sections select generously from her earlier two books, with some revisions. Her lines in those earlier books dance on the page, always seeking a place to leap, and unexpected trajectories. Energy of rhythm and assurance of connection weave a remarkably wide territory of emotional understanding. The setting is Perth and its wheat-belt inland; the poems engage personally with the matters of childhood, adulthood and family, and with the girl immigrant’s awareness of ‘the salt of distant throats’. Polain’s new poems focus her essential élan and fierce intelligence on the solitary psyche, summoning grief and fear in a place of stillness and vulnerability. This strikingly immediate poetry is probably her most searching and complex yet.
Born in Singapore in 1958, Marcella Polain migrated to Perth at two, with her Armenian mother and Irish father. She has worked in theatre, screen-writing, and as a teacher, and currently lectures in the Writing program at Edith Cowan University. She has been poetry editor for Westerly and Blue Dog. Her first poetry collection, Dumbstruck (1996), won the Anne Elder Prize; Each Clear Night (2000), was shortlisted for the WA Premier's Award. Her PhD in 2006 explored her family's survival of the Armenian genocide. Her novel, The Edge of the World (2007, Fremantle Press) was shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for First Book. From David Lumsden, Australian Book Review,June 2009, p.59:
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John Jenkins: Growing up with Mr Menzies ISBN: 978 0 9805269 0 5
Rarely is a book about growing-up so free from nostalgia, but full of such bittersweet portraits. It is the story of the early years of Felix Hayes, born in 1949 in suburban Melbourne. It is also John Jenkins’ meditation – implicit everywhere, and at times direct – on memory and fiction, and on the embodiment of history in the lives of individuals. He is deft with the flexible rhythms of free-verse forms. The evocations of the secret spaces and places, and the relationships, of childhood are caught with beautiful economy and layering of tones and voices. Threaded through is the iconic figure of Mr Menzies, himself a layered character, as a guide to the Australian era that bears his name.
John Jenkins, born in Melbourne in 1949, has published eight books of poems, including Dark River (2004). His verse novel A Break in the Weather was short-listed for the 2004 FAW Christina Stead Award. His long poem Under The Shaded Blossom, which won the 2004 James Joyce Foundation Suspended Sentence Award, was adapted as a drama feature on ABC Radio National. He has published much non-fiction, including travel-writing and books on music and music theatre. He has collaborated often, in works across several media. Jenkins lives on the semi-rural outskirts of Melbourne. From Morag Fraser, ‘Best Books of 2008’, Australian Book Review, January 2009:
From Jill Bamforth, Cordite, March 2009, http://www.cordite.org.au/reviews/jill-bamforth-reviews-john-jenkins: John Jenkins’ narrative verse, Growing Up with Mr Menzies … introduces a world of strange possibilities and serious questions. From Geoffrey Lehmann, ‘Poetic Intimacies to be Shared’, The Australian, December 2008:
From Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times:
From Heather Taylor Johnson, Overland (195), winter 2009, p.118:
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Vincent Buckley: Collected Poems Edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, with a Foreword by Peter Steele  ISBN: 9780980526929 550pp, pbk RRP: 29.95   This harvesting of Vincent Buckley’s work is a long overdue moment in Australian poetry. Not only was Buckley a profoundly original, steadily changing poet; he was also an intellectual leader in our culture during the politically demanding decades that followed World War Two. His poems, gathered here, bear witness to the conflicts of those years, to his Irish-Australian heritage, to interactions with modern American poetry and, above all, to his delicately lyrical sense of mortality. A nervous energy pulses everywhere.
Vincent Buckley (1925-88) was born in rural Romsey, just north of Melbourne. After two years in the RAAF and its hospitals, he studied Arts from 1946 at the University of Melbourne. He taught in the English Department there until retiring from a personal Chair in 1987. One of Australia's most distinguished critics, and a powerful social commentator, he wrote three seminal books of criticism, much journalism, and memoirs on Melbourne and Ireland - his two homelands. He stayed in Dublin for several months on a first visit in 1956, and again in 1977and early 1981. He spent a year, 1981-82, in the Kildare countryside, and was in Ardmore for three months in 1986. Acknowledged as a major poet after Arcady, 1966, and Golden Builders, 1976, his prizes included the John Bray Award for the posthumous Last Poems in 1992. From Peter Craven, The Age, May 9 2009, p.22:
From Gregory Kratzmann, ‘The life and poetry of Vincent Buckley’, Australian Book Review, July-August 2009, p.17:
From Alan Wearne, Australian Literary Review, 4(1), February 2009, p.23:
From Carolyn Masel, Eureka Street, 19(6), April 2009:
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ISBN: 9780980526943
This third book is a radical departure in Morgan Yasbincek’s poetry. A concentrated dialogue with the world around her, displayed in her first two books, gives way to poems that suggest aftermath and new beginning. Their contemplations occur in the spaces left after loss, where love and grief are ‘kinds of home without settlement’. They summon up the pluck and rapture of childhood, and the wisdom of religions: Buddhist, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, and a resilient and matriarchial animism. The movement of voice here seems to rely on vacuum and echo for its definitions. The poems refract a spectrum of meanings, from inward directness, to inventive allegory. In the key poem ‘gimel’, the undulating gait of the white camel ‘makes this direction into a future’. Yasbincek’s own rhythms, as ever, are assured and light-syllabled.
Morgan Yasbincek was born in 1964 in Sydney, and moved in 1972 to Perth where she lives. She has published two collections of poetry and a novel, liv. Her first collection, Night Reversing, won the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. Her next collection, Firelick, was shortlisted for the 2005 Victorian Premier’s Award. She has taught creative writing in Australia and overseas and has recently mentored several first collections by emerging Western Australian poets. back to top
Jordie Albiston: the sonnet according to 'm' ISBN: 9780980526936 
The letter ‘m’ is emblematic of recurrence and precipitousness in these poems. They emerge with the wantonness of sensations in everyday life. In this case three lives: maternal grandmother, paternal great-great grandmother and the poet. Jordie Albiston, with characteristic delicacy and zest, limns these very different women as perspectives to each other. Recurrence is intrinsic to sonnets. They are patterned internally, and are often paroxysmal: a perfect form and formation for poems which worry the distinction between the fatal and the banal. The sequence tells what happens when you admit the existential into everyday life, in small or large doses. The results can be desolate, or sublime. And comedic as well: Albiston knows how to play between darkness and send-up, when it comes to an arduous and animating tension between body and mind.
Jordie Albiston lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1961. She is a poet whose work frequently reflects historical research. Australian composer Andrée Greenwell has adapted two of her books (Botany Bay Document, 1996 – retitled Dreaming Transportation – and The Hanging of Jean Lee, 1998) for music-theatre: both enjoyed seasons at the Sydney Opera House. Nervous Arcs won the Mary Gilmore Award for a first book of Australian poetry in 1995, and was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize. Her fourth collection, The Fall, was shortlisted for Premier’s Prizes in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. Here fifth, Vertigo|a cantata| was published by John Leonard Press, in 2007. She holds a PhD in literature. From Geoff Page, The Canberra Times, February 13, 2010: back to top
Catherine Bateson: Marriage for Beginners & other poems ISBN: 9780980526967
Catherine Bateson’s new poetry collection has at its centre three lively sequences that address the hard graft of spiritual negotiation. Imagined for present, past and future times, each of them tracks the slow and the sudden dissolution of love – yet love stories they are. Her characters are distinctly and originally conceived, with a habitual storyteller’s craft. Fore and aft of these sequences are some poems that are more directly reflective. ‘Marriage’ is the familiar here – or at least the otherness of daughterhood, motherhood and being a lover. ‘Beginners’, it is suggested, is what we remain. These poems are wise, unillusioned and generous, reminding us that ‘each morning/the fat eye of love/ winks back’. The poetry throughout has a confident grasp of telling images, and of tonal and rhythmical tact.
Born in 1960 in Sydney, Catherine Bateson grew up in Brisbane, and is a longtime resident of Victoria. She lives in the hills outside Melbourne where she teaches Professional Writing and Editing at TAFE and writes for children and young adults. Marriage for Beginners is her third collection of poetry. Her first collection, Pomegranates from the Underworld, was published in 1989. The Vigilant Heart followed in 1998 and was shortlisted in the Colin Roderick Award. Her novels for children and young adults have twice won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Younger Readers. Catherine ran the La Mama Poetica readings for a decade and regularly works as a poet and novelist in schools around Australia.
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ISBN: 9780980526950
Over his long career Mark O’Connor has made his poetic homes in a succession of Australian regions. Indeed from the time of Homer much of the best literature has been regional. It knows its own place so well that it has no need to be consciously universal; rather the world of readers comes to it. Pilbara alternates brief informative prose with bursts of magnificent free-verse lyric. O’Connor’s gift is for bringing a large array of knowledge to bear in observations of delicate precision, combining awe with a quiet humour. The vastness of Western Australia’s dry Pilbara is perceived in these poems, yet not allowed to dominate over its nooks and intimacies – the lives of birds, flowers, trees, and the unexpectedness of water. The 3.65 billion-year geological history of some of the oldest solidified land surfaces on our planet forms an underpinning. The work effortlessly takes in pre-history, history and ecology, along with current human realities like mining and grazing. ‘Archaean land, in the grip of modern raptors.’
Mark O’Connor, born in Ararat in 1945, grew up there and in Melbourne. He has taught English at several universities, has published sixteen books of verse, and edited Two Centuries of Australian Poetry He is a frequent voice on a range of ABC radio programs. The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O’Connor, is published by Hale & Iremonger. (OUP, 2nd ed. 1996). He was the Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Fellow in 1999, and thereafter a Visiting Scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. He has also published prose books on environment, population, and literary criticism; and his poetry shows a special interest in environment. back to top
ISBN: 9780980526974
All but four of these poems by LK Holt are fourteen-liners: free-verse sonnets if you like—certainly lyrics, but somehow massive. They have elegance, terror, surprising imaginations, humour and extraordinarily disciplined thought. The darting variety that marked her prize-winning first collection has come to a steadier gaze in her second. A nut-shell account of the book’s four parts might describe a movement from familial well-being—happy-being—to a concluding psalmic sufferance, through reflections on the survival-feats of boys and men, on the self-presence of young women, and on love. That description catches her intimate touch but not her outreach. Holt’s writing shows how the present doesn’t escape the weight, or the light, of ancient narratives. History stands inside poems of contemporary dailiness, turning them to half-epic.  LK Holt lives in Melbourne where she was born in 1982. Her childhood and growing up were mainly spent in Adelaide. Her first collection of poems, Man Wolf Man (John Leonard Press, 2007), won the 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Awards.
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ISBN: 9780980526998
David Musgrave’s poems are at once meditative and restless, elegant and sensual – with an energy of empathy that draws him to a wealth of subjects. They are in several kinds of free verse and formal constraint. Here is wit and melancholy in equal measure, with a dose of joyous satire thrown in. Waterscapes and landscapes figure strongly. Typically they move from the moment of observation to make transformative connections with emotional and imaginative states: the continual freshness of approach from one to another of these poems is a hallmark. Other poems meet human situations more immediately. The self, or some other, is substantiated with a generosity of feeling — and this becomes a startling quality within the strands of satire in some poems, notably ‘The Baby Boomers’. Generosity also drives — as much as an elegant form does — 'Young Montaigne Goes Riding'. Those two extended poems are peaks in a book of exuberant curiosity.
David Musgrave was born in 1965 and lives in Sydney. He is the author of the novel Glissando: a melodrama, the critical study Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean satire since the Renaissance and three previous collections of poetry. He is the publisher of Puncher and Wattmann and lectures at the University of Newcastle.  Like Petra White’s applauded first collection, her second begins and ends with a fable of the uncanny ordinary. Between is a cornucopia of odes: epistolary, philosophical, elegiac. These poems think through and honour the normal mysteries of fate. Her world is large and contemporary, anchored by a young poet’s own memories. White inhabits her poems lightly, using personal experience with wit and without self-pleading. Some of this work shows the shadow of depression: not so much expressing moods as touching on how depression dwells, finding its register so it can speak. A number of poems openly engage with notable depressives of literary history, but we don’t need those homages to realise that this poet is a very capacious reader. It is there in her music. Late Lowell and Bishop, along with Harwood, ghost the swift edge in her language. Beyond these, a large tradition of cadences and tropes is absorbed in her fluent free verse lines. 
Petra White was born in Adelaide in 1975, and lives in Melbourne, where she works in a government department and is studying for a Master of Public Policy and Management. Her first book of poetry, The Incoming Tide, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the ACT Poetry Prize. back to top
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