Jaya Savige
Jaya Savige’s most recent collection is Change Machine (UQP 2020). He is Assistant Professor of English and Head of Creative Writing at New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University, and Poetry Editor for The Australian. His previous collections include Latecomers, which won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Poetry, and Surface to Air, shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the West Australian Premier’s Prize. He read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, and has held Australia Council residencies at the B.R. Whiting Library, Rome, and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
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.
... (read more)
The title of Nick Riemer’s first volume of poems is taken from a piece of graffiti in a Sydney church, and the poems therein are aptly replete with a peripatetic, contemporary metaphysical wit. The volume as a whole has a sharp, cultivated air of philosophical enquiry, tending to nihilism, and is shot through with the poet’s continuous testing of the limits of language.
The opening poem, ‘T ... (read more)
In thrall to thresholds, drawn to every brink, at three weeks oldan infant’s eye adores the frames of things, the joinery that holdseach smudge in place, and individuates.
It feasts on edges, architraves and jambs, the skirting boardsof portals, vistas, stairs – the sinew ... (read more)
Critics often comment on the ‘shape’ a poem makes – not the concrete form of the words on the page, but the poem’s conceptual trajectory, the statement, development and resolution (or lack thereof) of its central theme. What is most striking about Robert Adamson’s first collection of poems published in North America, The Goldfinches of Baghdad, however, is the shape the collection makes ... (read more)
If ever there was a national question, it is this ... We were good enough to fight as Anzacs. We earned equality then. Why do you deny it to us now? ... We ask you to be proud of the Australian Aboriginal, and to take his hand in friendship … At worst, we are no more dirty, lazy, stupid, criminal, or immoral than yourselves … After 150 years, we ask you to review the situation and give us a ... (read more)