AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Jolly, Holtz, Irvine, Ouyang, Knight, Alizadeth, Wattison, Jaireth, Bateson, McDermott, Dearborn, Hardacre
By Magdalena Ball and Richard Hillman
Pomegranates Poems by Erica Jolly
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Pomegranates is an attractively illustrated and deceptively domestic book of poems. Deceptive, because, although the poetry generally appears to take on the gentle garden landcapes of the accompanying art deco flower pictures, most of it is scathingly political, and subtly hostile. The imagery is full of local flora and fauna; eucalypts, nasturtiums, mulberries, hollyhocks, rainbow lorikeets, lambs ears, honeyeaters, and acacias. There are delicate scenes of women, embroidering, baking, little girls playing with dolls, fragrant bubble baths, delicate glass ... |
Nights in the Gardens of Spain by Gershon Holtz
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Poetry is a good medium for baring the soul, but for the reader, the intensity and inward focus of the confessional style poem can often make for a dark, and occasionally dismal experience. On the other hand, poetry that errs on the side of the trite: rhyming singsong limericks, may be worth little more than a momentary chuckle. Gershon Holtz's Nights in the Garden of Spain presents the perfect balance. The poems are thematic, fun and clever, without ever becoming overly mired in tragedy or invective, but they are also profound, and at times, seriously ... |
Leaving The Mickey by Patricia Irvine
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Leaving the Mickey is aptly titled. Author Patricia Irvine has pulled together a series of poetry which is clever and humorous in an Ogden Nash kind of way. The cutely rhyming poems trip off the tongue and would make for excellent oral readings, or perhaps as song lyrics, accompanied by music to tease out the otherwise limited nuances. The first poem in the book, "Catholic Girls' Skipping Song 1959" sets the tone which is to follow: "Pellegrini,/ jellybeanie./Mortal sin's a/brief bikini./Sugar Stations/of the Cross./St Therese and fairy floss." The book is divided ... |
Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes by Ouyang Yu
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The poetry in Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes is lonely and stark, but often beautiful. Like all good poetry should, it goes straight to the heart, skipping the buffers that prose often provides. The poems are simultaneously modern and classic, picking up threads of the ordinary such as the computer or the mobile phone and turning them into icons of the human heart. The reader is dragged directly into the centre of the poet's pain as he confronts situations, some of which are normally joyous, with a kind of existential longing and ... |
Under The One Granite Roof by Karen Knight
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Walt Whitman is one of the world's most well known poets. We know him as one of the founders of the type of innovative free verse that has come to characterise modern poetry. He has been called America's national poet, and his work is known for its egalitarian voice, and is simultaneously spiritual, democratic, patriotic, full of love, life, the horror of war, and the beauty of nature. His participation as a civil servant during America's Civil War is profoundly important in his work. In Under the One Granite Roof, Karen Knight creates a composite ... |
eliXir: a story in poetry by Ali Alizadeh
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It is difficult, as a critic, to tear apart a poem or series of poems. When poetry comes across as trite, or meaningless, or worse, deliberately silly and confrontational, the reviewer is tempted to simply put the work aside and claim that it didn't speak to them and leave it at that. It seems almost impossible to go too deeply into bad poetry, to delve into meaning where there is none, or to tease out the vagaries of writing which comes across as random utterings. On the other hand, if we don't set up reasonable aesthetic standards, and make clear ... |
About the Reviewer Magdalena Ball
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Magdalena Ball has been writing professionally for over 20 years. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from CCNY (New York) with a BA in English Literature. She also studied English literature and business at a postgraduate level at Oxford University in the UK and Charles Sturt University in Australia and has an Master of Business. A wordsmith of all-trades, her publication credits includes fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in a wide range of online and print publications and anthologies, including Skive Magazine, Perigree, Harpweaver, Imago, Drexel Online Journal, and Midwest Book Reviews. She is the author of The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything, Editor-In-Chief of The Com, information manager for Orica, wife of one, mother to three, and is finalising her first novel, Sleep Before Evening. |
[Above] Photo of Magdalena Ball by Dominic Ball, 2004.
The Nihilist Line (The Fishwife's Other Tail) by Meredith Wattison
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As the seahorses spawn across my little Mac Classic's screen, I consider what should be said about Meredith Wattison's The Nihilist Line. Also, as someone who has not read Wattison's earlier poetry, including The Fishwife, immediate penetration into the salty mess of sea weed is a significant priority. The collection was read in one sitting and, true to its promise, darted about the stream of consciousness with enough variation to keep me guessing as to its as to its motives. Freud would have had a lot of fun with Wattison's cold-blooded gutting of desire ... |
Yashodhara: Six Seasons Without You by Subhash Jaireth
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I remember reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and thinking, Why was this written? At the time of its writing, circa early 1920s (following Hesse's self-exile in protest), Germanic thought was firmly ensconced in its own Enlightenment, reeling from a two hundred year debate prompted by Moses Mendelssohn and Emmanuel Kant. This argument, that the Jewish haskala and the German aufklärung were bound by a common destiny, spurred on through the writings of Hegel, Nietszche and Weber, and turned into a spectacle of race consciousness by the ... |
The Vigilant Heart by Catheron Bateson
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I saw General Cosgrove on the news. He looked a little worse for wear. The strain of encampment in enemy territory. The need to report back to the people who put him there. In his eyes a kind of vigilance, a subject who is always somewhere else. Not distracted, wary. And the only difference between Bateson's poetry and Cosgrove's interview are the battlefields they reflect. Bateson, of course, is serving time on the home front. A place where love is rationed like ammunition, to be kept in store for when it's needed. Took some time before I could ... |
Dorothy's Skin by Dennis McDermott
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Dennis McDermott, a psychologist living in the Blue Mountains, has written poetry that will re-kindle the fading hearts of those social anthropologists who still lurk within the lengthening shadow of domestic politics in Australia. His poetry lights up the slippery slope of the policy road just long enough to see the snake of modernity go under the skidding wheels of an honest social realism. After reading his poems there's a feeling that something's been left on that surface, a dry skin stretched across the road waiting for nature to do its job, for the birds ... |
Frankenstein's Bathtub by Tricia Dearborn
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Deb Westbury states on the back cover that Dearborn's poetry is 'witty and insightful'. And, that the Psycho shower scene conjures 'the sensuality of a steaming bath'. Westbury's criticisms, as Dearborn's mentor, are so prejudicial that they have stretched the curtain of literary contrivance beyond the parameters of professional practice and into the realm of mere bullshit. But Westbury doesn't stand alone on this back cover - beneath Dearborn's beseated figure in the top left hand corner is further criticism from Judith Rodriguez who, wittily ... |
The Year Nothing by Paul Hardacre
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This first collection of poems is at the cutting edge of social and personal odyssey. The Year Nothing, as with Dransfield's 'Ground Zero', shares absolutely nothing in common with Pol Pot's genocidal plan for Cambodia's erasure. Hardacre is adding to the present without the destructive need to erase the past. This effort to keep the past involved with an energetic present is revealed in the first of five parts, 'Millennium Fetish', with the brilliant opening poem 'Hand Carved Idol from Minsk'. This poem, the first I ever read of Hardacre's, has left a deep ... |
About the Reviewer Richard Hillman
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Richard Hillman grew up in the outer western suburbs of Sydney with his mother Liz, elder brother Brett and younger brothers Shane and Daniel. When Richard left school he worked in a variety of jobs whilst completing tertiary studies at CSU (Charles Sturt University). This included lecturing at the UWS (University of Western Sydney). He moved to Adelaide with wife Allison and their three children Lachlan, Shanyn and Bronte, where he has continued his studies at Adelaide University, and Flinders University of South Australia. Richard has completed a PhD in Australian Studies at the Flinders University of South Australia, specialising in the writings of Jacques Lacan and the poetry of Francis Webb. Richard is currently Director of The SideWaLK Poets Collective Inc., and publishes books under the SideWaLK label. He is also a contributing editor for papertiger, an international CD-ROM poetry journal. Richard's career as a writer has included radio talkback shows, live internet performances, and readings at many of Australia's most well known literary venues. Richard's poetry has been published widely throughout Australia. |
[Above] Photo of Richard Hillman and Adelaide rosella by Duncan Kentish, 2002.
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Thylazine No.10 (September, 2004) |
