Graeme Miles
The Unspeak Poems, Tim Thorne’s fourteenth collection, is characteristically politically engaged and international in its scope. The best of these poems make use of Thorne’s acute ear for everyday speech. ‘Gettin’ there’, for instance, sad and memorable, creates through jumpy fragments of wry observations and narrative a picture of misguided hope against loaded odds: ‘The saddest place I’ve ever seen / is the bus shelter outside Risdon prison. / You lose about one teddy bear per eviction / on average.’ The same talent is used to different effect in recording the incoherence of racism in ‘7/11’.
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Between 1889 and 1892, young Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd corresponded with the ageing Walt Whitman. Leaves of Glass, David Prater’s second collection, vividly imagines this long-distance relationship. This is not, however, a historical novel in verse. It refracts the correspondence through a perpetually shifting series of voices and forms, from heavily ...
Graeme Miles, born in Perth in 1976, has lived and studied in India and Europe, and now teaches Classics at the University of Tasmania. His work, though various, is highly distinctive. Much of it exists at the difficult-to-imagine intersection of philosophy, mythology, and surrealism. Its rhythms and cadences are highly accomplished; its erudition effortless and unpretentious.
... (read more)Distant, untouchable night is stooping
over fingers of street-lights
that push her away. And the children of night?
The children of night are in hiding
Jaya Savige reviews 'Phosphorescence' by Graeme Mile, 'Peeling Apples' by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and 'James Stinks (and so does Chuck)' by Nick Riemer
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.
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