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Poetry

Do people hate poetry, as the title of Ben Lerner's terrific book-sized essay implies? In Lerner's account, poetry is associated with hatred and contempt, even by ...

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Published in August 2016, no. 383

A new poetry press in Australia should always be greeted with joy, and then interrogated with rigour. These six volumes from the recently created book arm of Cordite Poetry ...

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Published in August 2016, no. 383

Stephen Edgar reviews 'Collected Poems' by Vikram Seth

Stephen Edgar
Thursday, 21 July 2016

In one of the poems in Summer Requiem, the most recent of the books in this capacious volume, Seth recalls when he decided to write, 'What even today puzzles me ...

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Published in August 2016, no. 383

Jill Jones is Poet of the Month

Australian Book Review
Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Poetry is, usually, shorter, and, in many but not all cases, the lines turn. I've become less attached to prose, especially prose that pretends to 'the poetic'. I'd rather read a book that's prosaic, in the true sense, than a 'poetic' novel. Some prose is poetry, of course, but not because it's poetic. I won't even start on hybrid works.

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Reading these three books in April, it was impossible not to see in them flashes of what Ross McMullin has described in war artist Will Dyson's drawings from World War I ...

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In this episode of the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry Podcast, state editor Peter Goldsworthy introduces the 2016 New South Wales poets: Aidan Coleman, Jelena Dinic, Jill Jones, Kate Llewellyn, Kat Bolton, and Thom Sullivan.

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Jordie Albiston is Poet of the Month

Thursday, 28 April 2016

Poetry can say anything that prose says, but it has to get there far more quickly and in much less space. I think this sense of spatial, psychological pressure is the main point of difference.

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Published in May 2016, no. 381

Although William Carlos Williams, with some accuracy, claimed that ‘every’ poem is an ‘experiment’, the number of successful experiments is relatively rare. Jordie Albiston’s new ‘long poem’ or ‘verse novel’ (call it what you will) is triumphantly experimental in both technique and content.

In technique, Albiston has done several things whi ...

Published in May 2016, no. 381

Peter Porter's posthumous collection of poems, Chorale at the Crossing, is preoccupied, understandably, with death – but death was a central preoccupation of his work from the beginning. How could it not be? He lost his mother at the age of nine.

Porter's two Collected Poems (1983 and 1999) were – are – stupendous, exuberant treasure- ...

Published in May 2016, no. 381

From the cover of Jennifer Maiden's latest book (The Fox Petition, Giramondo, $24 pb, 96 pp, 9781922146946), a wood-cut fox stares the reader down. This foreign, seditious animal is the perfect emblem for Maiden's examination of the xenophobia, conformity, and general moral diminution that she sees around her. Giramondo have given Maiden the liberty of an a ...

Published in April 2016, no. 380