Poetry

In 1982 a young Steve Kelen published a slim volume by an even younger poet by the name of Luke Davies. Four Plots for Magnets was a chapbook of thirteen poems written mostly when the poet was eighteen and nineteen. Published by Glandular Press, an outlet established by Kelen and the painter Ken Searle in 1980, this ‘sampler’ (as Kelen later calls it) was in a monochrome, staple-bound format. The cover layout came courtesy of another poet, Ken Bolton, its one adornment an image from a 1970 American NFL yearbook illustrating moves in gridiron, a game for which Davies had a childhood obsession.

Home by Dark is Pam Brown’s seventeenth book. She has also published ten chapbooks, including two collaborations. Brown’s poems are mostly elliptical, pithy, hewn into slight lines that imply or jest. Each poem manoeuvres and collects the everyday. It is an aesthetic of accumulation, a bricolage that ...

Early in his Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton quotes the Russian formalist critic Roman Jakobson: ‘[literature is writing that represents] organised violence committed on ordinary speech.’ I don’t know if Corey Wakeling has been influenced by the formalists’ theories, but Goad Omen, his energetic first collection, is replete with estranging devices that bring attention to poetry as a structure in which ideas and images are set adrift from the anchor of ‘ordinary’ language in utilitarian settings. Within the space of a few lines in almost any given poem, violent ructions in image, ideas, syntax, and grammar occur: ‘pace the percussion of patience through lotus guarantee / banquet the animosity hoax, misplacement. Pert nark’ (‘The Blush’).

The scene: a cold, bright January day in the snow-covered capital of the United States. The occasion: the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Up to the podium steps America’s unofficial poet laureate, eighty-six-year-old Robert Frost. Temporarily blinded by the glare of brilliant sunshine and freshly fallen snow, Frost sets aside the handwritten text of his specially prepared ‘Dedication’ and recites from memory a much earlier poem, ‘The Gift Outright’.

There are some poets whose works only seem to come alive when seen in the light of their other poems. Andrew Sant may well be one of these. A Sant poem, read on its own, can often seem thoughtful but rather lightweight; embedded in one of his books, given a context by the surrounding poems, it becomes animated by a set of consistent themes and obsessions.

‘Poetry is a long apprenticeship,’ says Toby Davidson at the start of his first collection. He is certainly a poet who has mastered far more than the basics. Beast Language is only seventy-seven pages long, but feels far more substantial. Davidson has travelled a long way: from west coast to east, from novice to scholar ...

In The Resistance to Poetry (2004), James Longenbach claims that ‘Distrust of poetry (its potential for inconsequence, its pretensions to consequence) is the stuff of poetry.’ The Australian poet Laurie Duggan has based a career on a creative distrust of poetry, or at least a certain kind of attitude to ...

The critical essays collected in this current issue of Australia’s oldest literary journal make for frustrating reading. The theme is true crime, with a focus on the relationship between the sensational and the literary. Topics range from Underbelly Razor to the Jerilderie Letter to Schapelle Corby’s autobiography. Fascinating material, no doubt, but most of the contributions fail to engage and feel more like mutilated book chapters or hurriedly swept-together research notes, characterised by erratic analyses and flabby prose.

‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.