Jackson’s new collection traverses science and spirituality, philosophy and matter. Drawing from physics, systems theory, Daoism and more, it contemplates profound questions about our place within a world of being. With deft silences and fine observations, these poems explore both modern and ancient paths to knowledge, seeking to ‘fully apprehend nature, including our fellow beings, and foster a reverent respect for it’.
The six senses have rarely been invoked in such sustained and evocative poetical terms. Whether one wants to understand touch, taste, smell, hearing, intuition or sight, this volume provides myriad avenues enabling a rich appreciation of sensory experience.
Wardrobe of Selves, Peter Bakowski’s seventh full-length poetry collection, pays homage to: the acrostic poem, aphorisms, blues and roots music, the cities of Berlin, Melbourne and Paris, espionage, film noir, haiku, humour, modern history, pacifism, painting, photography portraiture, proverbs, quotations, the sonnet, surrealism and travel.
Poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance are back with another excursion into the linguistic and visual pleasures of found text, a joint practice which brought us 2017’s Members Only. With this book, Listen, bitch, they turn their attention to misogynist language, working with a corpus of several decades’ worth of statements by powerful Australian public figures (and other blokes with big platforms). By listening very closely to the snarlings of what Kate Manne calls the law enforcement branch of the patriarchy, these poems attempt to map the lines women are still not supposed to cross in contemporary Australia, and to document the consequences suffered when they do. The results are sometimes harrowing, sometimes ridiculous, and always thought-provoking.
O’ muses excuse
this non-descript call IWonder who
among you apt who
interested
Sing to Me is a collection of poems prompted by classical Greek narratives in such sources as Homer, Hesiod and Ovid. Around Grecian orchards … in Trojan battlefields … washed up with Aphrodite … paeans reveal indictments and human concerns surface.
In this, his fifth full-sized collection, Paul Cliff evokes the city of Canberra and surrounding region, where he has lived for the past 20 years. The poems work via characteristically wideranging moods and voice registers, from lyrical and elegiac to narrative and comic. They also deploy a variety of forms, from sonnets and odes to fables and epigrams, underlain by seductive rhythms and arresting metaphor. The capital’s festivals, institutions and monuments, everyday street life, suburbs, and lakescape are investigated, while the more distant terrains of Weereewa (Lake George), Namadgi, the Monaro, the Snowy Mountains, and the South Coast of New South Wales are also evoked in engaging and often striking terms.
These prose poems – I would like to call them ‘moments of poetry – recall journeys and intimacies, spaces of habitation, daily practices of denial, rescue affection or assertation. They reflect on negotiations between body and mind that can so fiercely mark the experience of womanhood, striving to capture the intermittent intensity of this ‘boundless resistance’ through the impact of summer and winter storms.
The poems in Alyson Miller’s debut collection are an exploration of the taboo and violence of human nature. From sexuality to the threatening and deadly, these prose poems off new perspectives on the unspeakable, shadowy places of human experience.
In A Common Garment, Anita Patel reminds us that nothing is ordinary. These intensely sensuous poems are rich in flavour, scent, colour, and the sound and feel of languages that inhabit the body and shape our unique selves.
This new prose poetry sequence from Paul Hetherington explores the power of memory and the hauntings of childhood. It takes the reader on a sensuous and richly imagistic journey into expansive ideas of self and identity. It probes and questions the nature of recollection, and how the role of the father and mother may be understood, drawing on a number of existing literary works to create elaborately poetic and deeply satisfying verbal textures.
These haiku were written over three summers, camping on our piece of land near Waihi in Aotearoa New Zealand, and, for contrast, one winter sojourn there in our newly-built gypsy wagon. The land is bordered by the Mataura stream—which means ‘red face’. We call the place ‘Land of the shining stream’ or ‘River’s edge’. The eels are named Brad and Angelina. One day, we’ll build a house there. In the meantime, we’re developing the land along permaculture principles, and noting moments both practical and transcendant.
