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John Mateer

John Mateer’s Elsewhere is a collection of poems from elsewhere – other small-press publications – and about elsewhere. The book is divided into three parts: ‘Azania’, which documents Mateer’s return to his homeland, South Africa; ‘Medan and Zipangu’, which contains poems inspired by travels in Asia; and ‘Americas’, which takes the United States and Mexico as its subjects. In ‘Uit Mantra’, one of the poems in the collection, Mateer describes the poet as ‘another name for emptiness’. As he traverses the various landscapes and cultures that inspire him, Mateer acts as a cipher for both the tangible particularities of experience – landscapes, history, people – as well as the unsayable and the unsaid – the repressed, metaphysical and hallucinatory.

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The Ancient Capital of Images by John Mateer & The Yellow Dress by Yve Louis

by
November 2005, no. 276

John Mateer’s fifth poetry collection confirms him as a poet of considerable assurance and originality. The Ancient Capital of Images is, in a sense, a metaphor for the poetic imagination – the entity formerly known as the Muse. The terrain ranges from South Africa to Australia to Japan. It is in the latter section that his achievement is most impressive. There is little here of the travelogue, the sense being rather of an inward journey.

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In Australia, despite having Indonesian as one of the languages commonly available to students in primary and secondary school, and despite having departments of Indonesian Studies in all the major universities, the literature of the world’s third most populous country and ‘our closest neighbour’ is not well known. It is mostly the province of academic specialists, not general readers. The reason for this is partly cultural in that Australian readers, particularly readers of poetry, tend to be more interested in American, European or British poetry, and partly a consequence of the poor support given to the art of translation. Yet two of the best-regarded translators of Indonesian literature, Harry Aveling and Max Lane, reside in Australia.

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On the second last day of the weeklong Poetry Africa 2001 international festival in Durban, South Africa, an interview with me appeared in one of the national newspapers. The text presented me as a returned exile. I was asked questions such as: ‘Have you lost your South Africanness, or do you still need it?’ Since my return to South Africa – I was last here in 1995, just after the first ‘free and fair’ election – I’ve been asked about my feelings towards South Africa and Australia. The questions are always intentionally superficial: there’s a right and a wrong answer. I’ve found that usually the best response is evasion or, better, a lie. In their questioning is a not so subtle politics of decorum: Are you a foreigner? If you are, mind your manners.

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Many see John Tranter as an important, if slightly peripheral, figure in contemporary Australian poetry. He is well known for his long involvement in the Sydney poetry scene, as well as for his role as an editor, particularly for his editing, with Philip Mead, of the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) and, more recently, of the internet poetry journal Jacket.

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On the last day of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I attended a session titled ‘Hope and Wright Remembered’, a presentation intended as a memorial for those two well-known figures of Australian poetry, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright. For a panel on poetry, it was exceptionally well attended, the Merlyn Theatre being nearly full. I had the impression that the session would be one of two things: either a commemoration ceremony for the recently departed, in which those left behind would eulogise the Great Man and the Great Woman, or it would be a chance for criticism in both its affirmative and condemnatory modes, a chance to make claims either for or against the poets’ work.

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If presence in literary journals, anthologies and at writers’ festivals may be taken as an indication of a poet’s importance, Anthony Lawrence has for some time been regarded as one of Australia’s foremost poets of the post-­’68 generation. He has published five books of poetry, all of which to my knowledge have been well received, and he has also been the recipient of many prizes, most recently the inaugural Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize and one of the Newcastle Poetry Prizes for 1997. With the publication of his New and Selected, Lawrence seems to have been canonised.

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