Island Press

Urban Elegies by David Brooks

September 2007, no. 294

When David Brooks’s last volume of poetry, Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried particular weight and fascination as his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which, for some of us, was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved out of fault-lines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, after only a two-year gap, Brooks’s new collection of poems, Urban Elegies, has been published by the Island Press co-operative.

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Microtexts by Martin Langford

by Kerry Leves •

August 2006, no. 283

Microtexts (Island Press, $21.95 pb, 93 pp) is a set of aphoristic prose pieces grouped under the following chapter headings: ‘Poetry and the Narrative of the Self’; ‘Poetry and Poetics’; ‘Writing’; ‘Art’; ‘Reading’; ‘Critics and Criticism’. It is not academic literary theory, but personal and professional musings by a poet with five collections to his credit. Martin Langford’s poetry adopts a lyric voice which, to my ear, sounds variations on the ground-bass of a slightly lugubrious, melancholy tone. It is idiosyncratic and not unpleasant: ‘time we outwitted / behaviour, the sad primate life’ (from his poem ‘Lake Coila’).

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In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children by Philip Hammial & Home Town Burial by Martin R. Johnson

by Oliver Dennis •

May 2004, no. 261

Oliver Dennis reviews ‘In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children’ by Philip Hammial ‘Home Town Burial’ by Martin R. Johnson and ‘Loneliness’ by Maurice Strandgard

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.

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Poetry Shorts

by Bev Roberts •

April 1996, no. 179

Browsing through some of the late 1995 offerings from small poetry presses was a case of moving between the dark and light in both themes and styles.

Decidedly on the dark side were two chapbooks from Shoestring Press in Nottingham, giving English publication to the work of two oddly matched Australian poets, Dimitris Tsaloumas and Tim Thorne.

Tsaloumas’ poetry is characterised by gravitas and a grand universality of theme and has sometimes seemed exotic or anachronistic in the less formal, more colloquial context of Australian poetry. Interesting that his English publisher felt it necessary to provide a brief Foreword to Six Improvisations on the River, offering a cautionary note:

[Tsalomas’] mode of writing may fret British readers conditioned to expect a less composed, a rawer poetry, one attempting to recreate the force of immediate experience.

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