Australian Poetry

The Metal Detectors

December 2003–January 2004, no. 257

He sang of old coins buried beneath the dunes,
to the north of the island, near the old artillery battery.
For forty years he rowed for mullet north, and south,
where the war epic motion picture was shot recently.

To the north of the island, near the old artillery battery
we played hide and seek as kids in acres of bladey-grass.
Where the war epic motion picture was shot recently
no one was allowed within a thousand metres.

... (read more)

The Best Australian Poems 2003 edited by Peter Craven & The Best Australian Poetry 2003 edited by Martin Duwell

by David McCooey •

December 2003–January 2004, no. 257

David McCooey reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2003’ edited by Peter Craven and ‘The Best Australian Poetry 2003’ edited by Martin Duwell

Writing this on the first Tuesday in November, I am struck by how different contemporary Australian poetry is from the Melbourne Cup. There is no money in poetry, of course, and in horse racing everyone, even the horses, are much better dressed. What’s more, despite complaints to the contrary, the returns are usually better when it comes to reading poetry than spending your days at the TAB. Martin Duwell’s The Best Australian Poetry 2003 and Peter Craven’s The Best Australian Poems 2003 are dead certs, compared to the boundless unreliability of horses.

... (read more)

The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets edited by Geoff Page

by Richard King •

November 2003, no. 256

This book, says Geoff Page in his introduction, should ‘cheer up those who are prone to lament the passing of “form” from contemporary poetry’. Speaking as one who does employ the f-word now and again, I’m very glad to hear it, though I catch the note of sardonicism and think that Page rather misses the point when he writes, again a little satirically, that some ‘may complain that fourteen lines “do not a sonnet always make”‘. I, for one, am more likely to complain that a poem of roughly sonnet proportions ‘does not a decent poem make’; the sonnet (I’d say) is a means, not an end. Apart from the obvious cases of ‘straitjacketing’, of forcing a form upon such content as may be naturally resistant to it, there is the fact that too smooth a rehashing of forms is one of the things – just think of Kipling – that announces a poet as irretrievably minor. Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example: in poets of only moderate skill, its closing couplet will tend to betray a cluck of self-congratulation.

... (read more)

For Yette in a Red T-Shirt, Running

by Jennifer Strauss •

November 2003, no. 256

A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –

Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;

a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap

closes another deluded seeker of asylum

behind barbed wire; civil liberties

are spooked by terror; girl children

trafficked to sexual servitude –

and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,

the great-grandmother of my children

dead in another camp, another winter, another story,

can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –

although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart

is dry as yesterday’s crusts.

... (read more)

On La Cienega

by John Tranter •

November 2003, no. 256

By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.

... (read more)

Shadows

by Peter Steele •

September 2003, no. 254

Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations

jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow

my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened

as I am not by a lost country.

... (read more)

In ‘the Ukraine’

by J.S. Harry •

June–July 2003, no. 252

He meets a man with an icicle voice

who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’

to act impulsively; this man elevates

‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships

at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar

(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,

at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –

which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed

pickled brain, in a jar).

... (read more)

Lost in the Foreground by Stephen Edgar

by Judith Beveridge •

May 2003, no. 251

Judith Beveridge reviews 'Lost in the Foreground' by Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar’s fifth volume, Lost in the Foreground, is a book of marvels, both technically and in the elegant, magisterial reach of its content. He is wonderfully inventive, and his complex rhyme schemes and forms are achieved with such precision and finesse that one can only conjecture as to how long each piece must have taken to become so lovingly and artfully realised.

... (read more)

Mangroves by Laurie Duggan

by Laurie Duggan •

April 2003, no. 250

Poems are like mangroves. They lodge and grow in the mind, becoming part of us, just as these plants take root in estuarine silt. Even on the page, there is sometimes a resemblance. As its title suggests, Laurie Duggan’s first volume since New and Selected Poems (1996) is substantially a product of his recent move to Brisbane, containing a large section of poems coloured by references to the city’s subtropical conditions. However, Mangroves also brings together varied material that dates from 1988 to 1994, some of which – notably the ‘Blue Hills’ sequences – has been published elsewhere.

... (read more)

Ideological Moments

by Peter Porter •

September 2002, no. 244

The history of emancipation.

Overtaken, riding uphill.

... (read more)