New collections from Caitlin Maling and Kristen Lang are situated in vastly different landscapes but pursue similar ideas about the natural world’s fragility and the imminent environmental catastrophe. Maling’s Fish Work, as its title suggests, is primarily interested in marine life and the scientists studying it at Lizard Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef, while Lang’s Earth ... (read more)
Ella Jeffery
Ella Jeffery is a poet, editor, and academic. Her first collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry and was published in June 2020. She holds a PhD from Queensland University of Technology and in 2019 won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award.
Precise observation is considered a prerequisite for poetry, but there are limits as to what a surfeit of detail can bring to a poem, or even to an entire volume. Three new poetry collections, each different in tone and subject matter, deploy close observation to varying degrees of success across poems that scrutinise domestic tension, interspecies dynamics, landscape, and everyday grace.
... (read more)