Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Australian Poetry

Listen, Lesbia!
Surely you can hear.
Shake off that silly hangover
while I part the curtains
just slightly.

...

The Shorter Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus by Gaius Valerius Catullus, translated by A.D. Hope

by
July–August 2007, no. 293

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.

... (read more)

This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forward, or a further refinement, of his work.

... (read more)

Dimitris Tsaloumas is often thought of as a poet writing between two languages. In his English poetry, this emerges in the way that the everyday diction of Greek often functions as the learned register of English. ‘Nostalgia’, as a compound word, is a modern Western coining, but when Tsaloumas opens the volume with ‘Nostalgia: A Diptych’, he evokes the Greek components of the word, particularly nostos with its connotation of Homeric return.

... (read more)

Westering by Peter Kirkpatrick

by
June 2007, no. 292

‘Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply literate poems.

... (read more)

To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce
that airless element, the body
breathing calm within its envelope of gas …

Morning took me to the jetty.
I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:
as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared.

... (read more)

On a recent plane trip from Wagga to Sydney, I was talking to an engineer who uses X-ray technology to examine the deep structure of aircraft after stress, to assess airworthiness. Complicated, fascinating, with considerable and direct bearing on passenger safety. By way of exchange, I read him parts of Aileen Kelly’s ‘Simple’, an impressive poem that, in three stanzas, X-rays the history of Christianity. One of the latter’s faultlines ‘racked / sweet fanatic poets between lambchrist / and tigerchrist’. Other stress fractures are ‘the dark arcades / where losers piss themselves / off the edge of memory’. My travelling companion had an immediate sense of Kelly’s fine metaphysics, which, as the back-page blurb glosses, finds ‘the numinous in the undeniably secular’.

... (read more)

A Bud by Claire Gaskin & Cube Root of Book by Paul Magee

by
March 2007, no. 289

Paul Magee’s first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life. He revisits past incidents, examining what draws him to poetry. Magee’s accurate translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus, interspersed throughout, heighten his subject matter but contrast with his own less proven work. Yet these translations draw attention to his fragmented, deracinated modern life, apparent in the various styles he employs, from the explanatory and prose-like to the chopped expostulations of love or lament. Some translations are playful – ‘Sleep embraced their weary limbs … and I looked up the word for patefactus’ (‘Aeneid II’) – while others superimpose order, as in ‘Mr Ruddock’s speechwriter (Philippic 1)’: ‘The asylum in the desert swallows the phrase, a throat / a drain with birds circling, a gate.’

... (read more)

The Best Australian Poetry 2006 edited by Judith Beveridge & The Best Australian Poems 2006 edited by Dorothy Porter

by
February 2007, no. 288

Seeing these two anthologies side by side in that obscure corner allocated to poetry by so many bookshops, a casual browser might note that both begin with Robert Adamson’s ‘A Visitation’ and conclude that uniformity rules and one volume will suffice. Not so: a full savouring of the past year’s poetic crop requires both. In fact, ‘A Visitation’ is the only poem common to both selections. Certainly, they share poets – and it is among these twenty that readers are likely to recognise ‘established’ names such as Alan Gould, Kate Llewellyn, Jan Owen, Peter Porter, Philip Salom (all in their egalitarian alphabetical order), but in each case the particular poem selected is different. Beyond that, there is substantial variation in the selection of poets: nineteen of Beveridge’s forty poets don’t appear among the eighty-two present in Porter’s more extensive volume.

... (read more)

The Apparition at Large is Black Pepper’s managing director K.F. Pearson’s second outing as the commentating enigma, most recently encountered in The Apparition’s Daybook (1995). Opening poems map the identity’s regular ‘haunts’ – the bars and cafés of inner-Melbourne – via evocative sketches of daily life’s unexpected sensuality: ‘A colour can completely drench our consciousness.’ Transient comforts and pleasures, while lingered upon, are undercut by the apparition’s humiliating invisibility and insubstantiality.

... (read more)