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David Gilbey
David Gilbey is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, President of Booranga Writers' Centre and Hon Secretary of ASAL.
Like a series of attenuated conversation poems, Drumming on Water is a narrative in forty-five riffs. The individual poems are like extended song lyrics – spoken jazz: ‘ad lib, of course / but also well thought out.’ The words are notes to sound and repeat, scoring the brief and unmemorable career of a jazz drummer with the Lizzie Rivers’ All-Girl Band of 1938 and regular gigs on Sydney Ha ... (read more)
These two new collections are both by, and maybe for, believers. They contain passionate and interrogative poems that argue for and celebrate their respective views of the world. Both poets are, to quote Rosemary Sorensen’s term for Goodfellow on the cover blurb, ‘evangelists’ who wear their respective hearts on their sleeves and who urge or invite assent.
Fontanelle, Andrew Lansdown’s se ... (read more)
At first, many of these forty-eight poems from two decades struck me as almost self-indulgent and mundane: short lyrics about family life, eating, drinking, dreaming of Valparaiso, lemons, the Molonglo River; though there was often an underside of premonition, discontent, and a stillness that made me think I hadn’t really understood. In the first group, ‘One Hundred Nights’ bothered me: ‘W ... (read more)
Lyn Hughes’s One Way Mirrors begins with a white horse impaled on headlights. It’s autumn, ‘the stars look cold and pinched’. You know it’s going to end badly and it does, mostly.
... (read more)
‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’
These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt des ... (read more)
Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, ... (read more)
... Be tough And dream. It's your only chance. Imagination precedes fact.
Born in Toowoomba in 1924 and serving in the RAAF in the Second World War, David Rowbotham has produced nine books of poems, four of prose (stories, novel, monograph), worked collaboratively on an autobiography while employed at the Brisbane Courier Mail for thirtytwo years, partly as the arts editor and partly as ... (read more)
One of the things Rod Moran is good at is an oxymoronic tenacity – a kind of deliberate insouciance, a restrained violence – due to his embrace of metaphor. His best poems articulate disturbing comparisons and create surreal hybrids. You can see this in some of the early poems from High Rise Sniper (1970–80) selected for this new collection, such as ‘Chemical Worker’: ‘this pure acid, ... (read more)
Okay, I’ll take up Kevin Murray’s challenge in his poem ‘Freelance’ – that the reviewer is ‘a rogue knight / circling other men’s dragons’, though, like Max Richards, I reject Walter Benjamin’s Romantic formulation of criticism as a ‘fulfilment / of the artwork’. Each of these dragons has some fine points; all are modest in their own ways and illustrate Shane McCauley’s glo ... (read more)