Jennifer Compton

Rose Lucas reviews 'Ground' by Martin Langford, 'Eating my Grandmother' by Krissy Kneen, and 'Now You Shall Know' by Jennifer Compton

March 2016, no. 379

In their very different ways, these three collections attest that contemporary Australian poetry is alive, robust, and engaging.

Puncher and Wattmann have delivered a generous collection of Martin Langford's most recent poems, Ground ($25 pb, 158 pp, 9781922186751). As we have come to expect from Langford, the voice we find here is strong – passio ...

'Sorrowful', a new poem by Jennifer Compton

by Jennifer Compton •

March 2013, no. 349

The house is up for tender and will be sold.
Houses always sell – in the end. Even if it is
for the land. Smoking out or treading down
the haunts takes three days, or even longer.

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Parker & Quink by Jennifer Compton & The Yugoslav Women and Their Pickled Herrings by Cathy Young

by Philip Harvey •

June-July 2004, no. 262

Philip Harvey reviews ‘Parker & Quink’ by Jennifer Compton and ‘The Yugoslav Women and Their Pickled Herrings’ by Cathy Young

Jennifer Compton creates uneasy feelings. Her monologues come from desperate people: frantic, locked out, locked in. They all have some secret and are going to tell us, if it takes subtlety or no subtlety. What saves their querulous, impossible concerns from turning into rants or whinges is Compton’s actorly control of voice. These are poems of original intent and purposive control. The shocking ideas at the centre of her poems are tempered by a voice trying to master the extreme reality they relate. Her dramatic proclivities inform her work at every tum: characters are usually in places they don’t want to be, new circumstances have to be negotiated with an old map of the mind. On occasion, Compton even writes directions straight into the verse (‘I’ll shift from my mother’s voice and just give you the gist’), an unashamed member of theatre workshops.

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