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Jennifer Maiden
Jennifer Maiden's eighteenth poetry collection, Liquid Nitrogen, won the overall 2014 Victorian Prize for Literature, and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Australian Prime Minister's Awards.
Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collect ... (read more)
The celebrated journalist Peter Arnett’s new autobiography Live from the Battlefield partly solves one mystery for me. For the last eighteen months, whenever I discussed Arnett and his forthcoming memoirs with my husband (who was trying to research Arnett’s relationship with news network CNN after the Gulf War), I found myself constantly and inexplicably analysing Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and ... (read more)
During that torrid season when I was trying to place my forever unplaced and ultra-controversial novel Complicity (now called The Blood Judge, with good reason) one well-known and basically sane Fiction Editor comforted me. ‘You see, we don’t just publish a book, we have to market a personality.’ He later became even more famous for trying to market a white author (whom he had never met) as ... (read more)
Despite the differences in style, careful logic seems to me to be the prevalent characteristic of both these accomplished poetry collections. Hard-won logic, too. In each, we are made aware often of the processes of achieving intellectual and emotional assessment and balance. As the titles indicate, poem after poem vividly accumulates details to settle on a succinct but more distanced and distanci ... (read more)
On Clare’s Skype the beach mixed every coral colour: the sheen,saw George, transforming their soft bedroom in her mother’sMt Druitt house to a Micronesian dusk. But this South TarawaBeach was much too empty. They had waited for the Afghani man,Farjaad, now for hours, but the boat that Clare had hiredfor her old friend Aunty to smuggle him from Nauru was off air.She said, ‘Maybe the Americans ... (read more)
Obama has said that the person with whom he would most like to dine is Gandhi.
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Nothing is whiter, like clouds with the sun inside them. Nothing is smoother, like clouds and the moon beside them. But they aren’t pure either. There is lily-green underside them. This is the start of an ASIO poem. Borges said living under dictators made him expert at metaphors. But lyricism is direct, adores the physical, the real. When young, one knew to recognise a worker for an intelligence ... (read more)
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