Adam Aitken

Cordon Sanitaire

April 2025, no. 474

Where the plantations begin
The scent of the earth, the true-born.
A foot on the earth, your earth.
An electrified fence to keep the cows from straying.

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Revenants by Adam Aitken

by Toby Davidson •

June 2022, no. 443

Toby Davidson reviews ‘Revenants’ by Adam Aitken

Since his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices. Aitken has always been a world citizen. He was born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother, with his childhood thereafter spent between the United Kingdom, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. As a young man, he attended Sydney University and embarked upon a long career as a poet, editor, and teacher which was recently recognised with the 2021 Patrick White Award.

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Archipelago by Adam Aitken & Present by Elizabeth Allen

by David Dick •

May 2018, no. 401

David Dick reviews 'Archipelago' by Adam Aitken and 'Present' by Elizabeth Allen

Both Adam Aitken’s Archipelago and Elizabeth Allen’s Present examine the establishment and mutability of identity in the worlds of objects, histories, literature, and media in which they place their speakers. Of course, the exploration of identity is a common theme of poetry, particularly as it pertains to how the material of language ...

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Contemporary Asian Australian Poets edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill

by John Kinsella •

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357

John Kinsella reviews 'Contemporary Asian Australian Poets' edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill

This is one of the more vital and significant poetry anthologies to appear in Australia. It has been compiled with a purpose as sophisticated and complex as the arguments for existence that it posits. It is an anthology not so much of ‘region’ (it is a rather massive one), as of the experience of being or having been from Asian heritages in contemporary Australia.

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Dalliance and Scorn by by Alan Gould with drawings by Anne Langridge

by Adam Aitken •

July 1999, no. 212

Alan Gould is not noted for being a poet of light verse, but with this volume he has achieved what brewers of light beer aim for strength without the hangover. The blurb rightly highlights Gould’s technique and lyrical gifts, and his acute vision of absurdity is present in abundance. Perhaps Gould has become the Heinrich Heine of Canberra, charting his city of decadence, with its down-and-outs, retired Army Majors, cheap opiates and X-rated entertainments, its dandified lobbyists, ‘Tsarevnas-on-the-dole’ and divorcees desperate for dalliance. Anne Langridge’s illustrations add to the book’s cabaret atmosphere, though you wouldn’t say Gould was paying homage to Berlin’s in the 1930s, with its Dada and expressionist camp.

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Mortal Divide: The autobiography of Yiorgos Alexandroglou by George Alexander

by Adam Aitken •

September 1997, no. 194

Adam Aitken reviews 'Mortal Divide: The autobiography of Yiorgos Alexandroglou' by George Alexander

Mortal Divide is an anti-oedipal odyssey, Joycean roman à clef, migrant memoir, and Orphic mini-epic. Nemerov’s self-reflexive Journal of a Fictive Life is one of its inspirations. George (Yiorgos) is a first-generation Greek translator working at the Multicultural Broadcasting Service. Victim of the media machine, he begins to hear and see things that aren’t ‘real’, including his spectral double Yiorgos Alexandroglou, and plunges videoleptically into dreams whenever he closes his eyes.

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