Peter Kenneally
Peter Kenneally is a writer, editor and librarian based in Melbourne. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the City of Melbourne Creative Writing Award and longlisted for the BBC Radio 4 National Short Story Prize.
Elizabeth McMahon is afflicted with the love of islands. In editing this issue of Southerly, her introduction tells us, she wanted to explore our fascination with them, in our imaginations and in our reality as an island continent surrounded by island nations.
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‘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, and the book has much of this movement in it.
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It’s simple. A young woman, her love for her partner slipping away, looks at their suburb, and him, and their relationship, and writes bronze-clad poetry about it. Then she takes to the bush, describing its towns and picking at its history with the same clear eye she uses to examine her lost love. She combines a photographic exactness with a resounding turn of phrase and an ability to use a refr ... (read more)
In 1985, at La Trobe University, a sociology undergraduate is in a tutorial with his supervisor. He has chosen to write 6000 words on the role of art and the artist in capitalist societies and his sixty-four-year-old tutor has, rather surprisingly, encouraged him.
In fact, as the student, Roger Averill, comes to know the older man, he realises that ‘for him, my over-reaching was a promising sig ... (read more)
In Alan Wearne’s new collection, his not-quite-self-appointed role as chronicler of Australian mora et tempores continues, more overtly than before. Prepare the Cabin for Landing pays homage to the Roman satirist Juvenal and his eighteenth-century heir, Samuel Johnson. Both shared what Wearne describes as ‘that combination of bemusement, annoyance, anger and despair to which your country (let ... (read more)
Michael Brennan has looked into the future in his new poetry collection, Autoethnographic, and come to the obligatory dsytopic conclusions. There is global warming, social breakdown, closed airports and borders, and so on, and, of course, a mysteriously catalytic event – in this case it is called The Great Forgetting. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Brennan is some kind of post-ever ... (read more)
As a result of the public works of Puncher & Wattmann, it has been established yet again that a book of poetry can andshould combine meaning and design in a shock of pleasure. Toby Fitch’s first full-length collection, especially the central title poem, does this in spades. Orpheus returns to Hades to rescue Eurydice. In ten poems, each mirroring the original Rorschach ink blot on the page f ... (read more)
Michael Farrell was the 2012 winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, awarded by this magazine. open sesame is his latest collection of poetry, and an earlier version of it won the inaugural Barrett Reid Award for a radical poetry manuscript, in 2008. It has 123 pages.
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A childhood in Australia, safe and dry, but somehow incomplete: then time overseas defining the self against a different sky; finally, the return home, perhaps to start a family and begin the cycle all over again. This is the experience, recognisable to so many Australians, that Jo Langdon encompasses, with a crisp and clear eye, in Snowline, the latest in a series of small chapbooks from Whitmore ... (read more)