Papyrus Publishing

The Escape Sonnets by Brian Edwards & Couchgrass by Dominique Hecq

April 2007, no. 290

Anthony Lynch reviews 'The Escape Sonnets' by Brian Edwards and 'Couchgrass' by Dominique Hecq

Dominique Hecq and Brian Edwards are well versed in the contingencies of language, roaming in their poetry between experimentation and high tradition – at least in terms of content, if not so much in form. Both target the self-reflexive play of language early in their latest collections: Hecq in her title poem, with ‘words spreading / like couchgrass after summer rains / on my tongue’; Edwards even more demonstrably in ‘Reading Althusser on Marx’, where ‘Standing between objects and meanings / the language: there are only partial truths’.

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All in Time by Brian Edwards & Dark River by John Jenkins

by Mike Ladd •

February 2004, no. 258

Dark River is John Jenkins’s fourteenth collection of poetry (including the six volumes he has produced with Ken Bolton) and a welcome addition to his oeuvre. This new solo collection contains the wit, language play and urbane imagery we are used to from Jenkins, as well as emotional depth and an infectious delight in language. Demonstrating this are the touching love poem ‘Why I Like You’ and three key elegies, or ‘dedicatory’ poems. The first of these, ‘Long Black’, dedicated to John Anderson, opens the book. This fine poem captures Anderson’s philosophy and his way with light and landscape. Anderson, a shy poet who died at the age of forty-nine without troubling The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, left behind three books whose cadences and unique way of writing about nature and its interconnectedness are still held in great esteem by those who are aware of his work, mainly other Australian poets. In ‘Long Black’, Jenkins (who accompanied Anderson on bushwalks) speaks to his departed companion, reiterating and questioning some of Anderson’s philosophy:

I watch the long black drink
turn in my hands. You say that
where you come from is where
you go to. You say the nothing in
everything is just nothing again.
Air fills the winter trees, but their
cold leaves can’t bring you back.

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Poetry Shorts

by Lauren Williams •

November 1997, no. 196

The introduction to this collection(Horns of Dilemma, Papyrus Publishing, $14.95 pb, 108 pp), and the poems themselves, make it clear that Helene Brophy is a woman of much compassion and experience in the humane realms of feminism, teaching and social work, as well as in the more personal spheres of serious injury, illness and death.

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