AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Politik, Friendly Street, Papertiger, Shapcott, Lloyd, Hammial, Hughes, McGuigan, Lenore, Lew, Lee, Aquilina
By Magdalena Ball and Liz Hall-Downs
Slam the Body Politik by the Synaptic Graffiti Collective
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Take a live poetry slam, mix it with state of the art flashwork, hard hitting music, and a hefty dash of political engagement and you have Slam the Body Politik. This well structured CD contains a huge number of performances, many with the rough and exciting feel of a live performance. The chances are that, of the 350 pieces which make up this CD, listeners/viewers will love some, and hate some, such is the nature of this work, which encompasses rap, live performance videos, cartoons, satire, broad scale ... |
Another Universe: Friendly Street Poets 28 Edited by Kate Deller-Evans and Steve Evans
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Friendly Street is a open mike poetry venue in Adelaide. It has been running for 29 years now and is Australia's longest running open poetry venue. Every month, a wide range of brave poets venture through its doors to perform their poetry to an eager audience. All poets who perform are eligible to submit their work to the annual Friendly Street anthology. The poems in Another Universe are varied in tone, some light and humorous, some deep and intense. Editors Kate Deller-Evans and Steve Evans do a very good job with both the selection of and balance ... |
Papertiger #03 Edited by Paul Hardacre and B. R. Dionysius
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If you've ever wondered, either as poet, or as reader, how multimedia might be used to expand the reaches and meaning of poetry, Papertiger's New World Poetry series is an excellent way of stimulating your imagination. New World Poetry is cited as the first professional CD-Rom poetry publication in Australia, and is groundbreaking in the scope of its works. The poets are global, and speak in a variety of accents and languages, and the media includes video, audio and Flash poems, visual/textual art, interviews, and ... |
Beginnings & Endings by Thomas Shapcott
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Picaro Press has been producing a number of very slim chapbooks on a theme. Small in conception, subtly attractive in design, and inexpensive to purchase, the idea is to bring poetry to as broad an audience as possible. Beginnings & Endings by one of Australia's most prolific and well known poets, Adelaide University's Creative Writing professor Thomas Shapcott, is one of these chapbooks. The book is only 24 pages, stapled and presented in an appealing beige bagasse cover with an etching of a tree. Inside there are 22 poems, each no longer than a ... |
Myrddins Needle by Eluned Lloyd
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Good poetry can skip through the façade of polite conversation and convention, moving deeper into the psyche, the emotions, the pain and joy under the skin. However, it is often difficult to toe the line between profundity and clarity, the moving experimental line and the creation of synthesised meaning. This is something which the poems in eluned lloyd's myrddins needle often struggle with. At their best, the poems are rich and full of evocative imagery, creating a complex emotional picture of a person dealing with loss in the midst of life, as in "i search ... |
In The Year of Our Lord Slaughter's Children by Philip Hammial
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In the year of our Lord slaughter's children has received overwhelmingly good reviews. Philip Hammial has been likened to a poetic Dadaist, a Surrealist, a primitivist, and even an "Art Brut" practitioner; critics using words to describe his work that are even more obscure and complicated than the poems themselves. Influences like Shaminism, voodoo, modernism, montage, ideogrammic, parataxis, and even atomism have been ascribed to his poetry. It isn't hard to see why Hammial has been so heavily lauded. His work clearly demonstrates a ... |
About the Reviewer Magdalena Ball
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Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader web site. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry and fiction. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from CCNY (New York), an MBA from Charles Sturt University (Wagga), and has studied literature on a postgraduate level at Oxford University (UK). She also works as a manuscript assessor for Manuscripts Online, is a member of the BookConnector Advisory Board, an Evaluative Reader for Catchfire Press, and Information Manager for Orica, not always in that order. Her non-fiction book, The Art of Assessment, was published by Mountain Mist Productions in 2002, and her collection of poetry, Quark Soup, is due for publication by Picaro Press shortly. Current projects include a novel Sleep Before Evening which is circulating, a biography of Prominent NSW forensic pathologist Dr Kevin Lee, and a second novel Theory of Everything which is 'in progress.' Magdalena lives in in NSW with her husband and three gorgeous children. |
[Above] Photo of Magdalena Ball by Oliver Ball, 2006.
from the Corridor of Mirrors by Judith Hughes
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This is a strange little book that, like many self-published titles, could have benefited from a tough editor. Though there are some luminous moments, much of the work in from the Corridor of Mirrors is infused with ambiguity, uncertainty, and unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. In "Part 1, Memories", the longish opening poem, "Lake Frome", seems like a conversation with both nature and the self. But there are rather too many distancing abstractions, (such as: 'perceptions [the mind] cannot grasp', 'moments of ... |
What the Body Remembers by Lorraine McGuigan
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I enjoyed this poetry collection immensely, and read it in one sitting. Lorraine McGuigan possesses all the qualities I like and respect in a contemporary poet - honesty, clarity, emotional engagement, technical adeptness, and the maturity to work - without hysteria or bitterness - some of the more difficult experiences of her early life into a narrative that, while not shirking from the horror of child abuse and neglect, is awash with compassion and acceptance for a mother who was clearly suffering from a mental illness. The end result, ... |
the Dog Rock by Miriel Lenore
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Miriel Lenore's latest collection of poems is essentially a family history, documenting (and, when this is not possible, imagining) the life of her great-great-grandmother, Sarah. Sarah, her husband Tom, and their three children escaped the hardships of Sussex in the 1830s to emigrate to Australia, where they settled on the western slopes of New South Wales' Great Dividing Range in the shadow of 'the Dog Rock'. Lenore's imaginary voice for Sarah is both well-modulated and believable in tone and accent, so that the reader feels we 'know' her, as we ... |
Anything the landlord touches by Emma Lew
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Emma Lew's first collection of poetry, The Wild Reply, was a joint winner of the 1997 Age Poetry Book of the Year Award. This, her second collection, published in 2002, contains more of her well-crafted, outward-looking poetry that uses often astonishing, unusual metaphors to great effect. Emma Lew's work is suggestive rather than specific; the poet does not over-explain her material but leaves it up to the reader to uncover the layers of meaning contained within the words. Mostly, this approach is startlingly effective, although it did sometimes ... |
Speak to the Moon by Patricia & Alexander Lee
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This is a spare but delightful little chapbook, a collaboration between a poet wife and her photographer husband from regional New South Wales. In the introduction Patricia Lee writes 'I believe poetry should communicate and I make no apologies for most of them being accessible'. 'Accessible', however, does not mean 'lacking in poetic ability or intensity', but the overall effect is of a gentle conversation with friends, ranging over discussions of world events, descriptions of people and places, and observing nature and art.. These poems do ... |
On a moon spiced night by Jude Aquilina
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Contemporary, clear-eyed, engaged with life - Jude Aquilina's poems evoke city and country, people, fruits and vegetables, the minutiae of life distilled into instances of great import. From carefully crafted stanzas, to more experimental concrete and prose poems, from lists of the fabrics worn by passers-by to the various qualities of nipples, this collection provokes thought, pathos, laughter, and sudden illumination on the extraordinariness in the ordinary. The ... |
About the Reviewer Liz Hall-Downs
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Liz Hall-Downs has been reading and performing poetry in public, on TV and radio in Australia and the USA, and publishing in journals, since 1983. She holds a BA from Deakin University (Victoria) with major studies in Professional Writing & Literature and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. Some of Liz Hall Down's publications include: Fit of Passion, (with Kim Downs), (Fit of Passion Collective, 1997), Girl With Green Hair, (Papyrus Publishing, 2000), People of the Wetlands, (Brisbane City Council, 1996), Mountains to Mangroves, and Mountains to Mangroves Haiku Cycle, (Brisbane City Council and Queensland Wildlife Preservation Society, 1999), Blackfellas Whitefellas Wetlands, (with B.R. Dionysius and Samuel Wagan Watson), (Brisbane City Council & Boondall Wetlands Management Committee, 2000). |
[Above] Photo of Liz Hall-Downs and Alice by Kim Downs, 2001.
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Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) |
