Oliver Dennis

… Let these dreams collide, as well as all those other childhood antidotes and poisons. Allow each its own freeze frame, but see how they are all recorded against the same backdrop, so, like an early animation, the light thumb of dreams may flick through the pages creating a seamless movie. In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her ... (read more)

Here are three volumes that offer differing responses to a world characterised by injustice, brutality and personal hardship. Far and away the most distinctive (and demanding) of these is Philip Hammial’s sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children. A contributor to John Tranter’s landmark anthology of 1979, The New Australian Poetry, American-born Hammial is known ... (read more)

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-light ... (read more)

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem follow ... (read more)