September 6, 2011 – 10:54 am
I recently reviewed issue nine of the journal :etchings for Cordite Poetry Review. The focus of the review is the issue’s poetry, as that is Cordite‘s focus, but I mention the fiction and nonfiction also. It begins: ‘Love & Something is the sub-header of :etchings 9, and the something seems to stand for the multitudinous meanings the [...]
September 1, 2011 – 11:40 am
Spent the morning writing and editing. Checked my email. Read a press release on Tim Sinclair’s new poetry book Re: Reading the Dictionary. Clicked the link. Bought it. Downloaded it. Read it from A to Z. Loved it. Wanted to tell you about it right away. Each piece from ‘Afflatus’ to ‘Zombie, Philosophical’ takes a [...]
Pulse Publications, 2010, 9780646540443 In naming her poetry collection The Geometry of Flight Angela Smith, like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, ‘chose wisely’. More wisely, more selflessly, than perhaps she realised. She has given multiple doorways to her work with the single phrase: porticos that set the reader’s path through the work, paths that [...]
I’m very excited to announce that a little haiku I wrote one morning is the winner of Australian Poetry’s haiPhone competition. It goes: Potential faces In steamy bathroom mirrors Residue of stars I’ve been invited to read it out as part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival on 1 June at the Poetry Cafe. G told me [...]
This review first appeared in the March 2011 issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine. UQP, March 2011 (Aus) 9780702238727 What do we want from a book of poetry? We want each poem to paint a picture, to shake us up a little, and to ultimately reach down inside us and peel something back. Ali Alizadeh’s poems do all [...]
By Angela Meyer
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Posted in Reviews + Analyses
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Also tagged Ali Alizadeh, Ashes in the Air, Australia, Australian poets, belonging, blandness, displacement, ignorance, injustice, Iran, paradox of choice, paradox of freedom, poets, The West
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December 21, 2010 – 12:40 pm
Fremantle Press, 2010 (Aus, US, UK) 9781921361869 Remember that Renaissance sculpture you admired, briefly, in a Roman or Florentine church, cool and hard and chiselled and, perhaps a little too dramatically posed? Reading John Mateer’s collection of poems The West, gives an analogous sensation. The sculptors worked in marble that kept its material nature, the hardness [...]
By Angela Meyer
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Posted in Other People's Words, Reviews + Analyses
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Also tagged Australian writers, Bowie, dactyl, Fremantle Press, Greg Westenberg, guest reviews, John Mateer, poetics, poets, precision, Renaissance sculpture, The West
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October 13, 2010 – 6:53 pm
Page Seventeen, 2010 9780980813609 Reviewed by Derek Motion I often have to catch the bus out to the university, and from the stop near my house the journey takes around 15 minutes. This parcel of time is – if you get straight on to the task and don’t waste any time looking out the window [...]
By Angela Meyer
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Posted in Reviews + Analyses
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Also tagged Australian authors, Australian literature, childhood, Derek Motion, family, guest review, motherhood, personal, poetry collection, poets, pregnancy, Tiggy Johnson
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August 17, 2010 – 11:27 am
harvest: issue 5 reviewed by Raili Simojoki Harvest ’s gentle, reflective, sometimes anxious writing appeals to Gen Y romantics who, dissatisfied by the disconnected, disposable information generated by mass media, are drawn instead to the poetic, intricate, and meandering. Editor Davina Bell speaks directly to this audience in her essay ‘To my Generation of Precious [...]
By Angela Meyer
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Posted in Other People's Words, Reviews + Analyses
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Also tagged Anthony Levin, Australian writing, Charles Bukowski, Chris Flynn, Dan Bigma, Davina Bell, essays, Gen Y, guest reviews, harvest, harvest issue 5, harvest magazine, information, literary magazines, Max Noakes, Nandi Chinna, navel-gazing, Nicola Redhouse, Raili Simojoki, Ruby Murray, Ryan O'Neill, short stories
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Gil Scott Heron is on Parole Maxine Beneba Clarke Picaro Press Reviewed by Greg Westenberg The rhythm: insistent, consistent, beat-heavy in places but with enough sunlight in the words to take us out of the club, into a community’s irregular syncopation; the rhythm, that I couldn’t always get (white boys, everybody knows it, can’t dance). [...]
October 16, 2009 – 8:05 am
Who is your favourite superhero and why? I’d love to say it’s some less-well-known-to-the-general-public superhero like Machine Man or Metamorpho, but to be honest it’s a tie between Superman and Spider-Man, partly because their costumes are so striking and colourful, partly because they’re both nice-guy superheroes who always try to use their powers to help [...]