I feel like both celebrating and, in some respects, mourning the missed opportunity that was available with Oliver Dennis’s edited Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford (2014). This volume brings into print for the first time a good many of Harford’s poems, some particularly significant. It has been a long time since Drusilla Modjeska and Marjorie Pizer’s The Poems of Lesbia Harford (1985), the first major collection of Harford’s poetry, and even longer still to Nettie Palmer’s first slim ...

‘I failed English literature when I was sixteen’. This, from the author who wrote The Butterfly Effect, the poetry book from 2005 that blew my mind with its heady mix of the critical and the lyrical; this from the same poet who went on to write Cow and Lupa and Lamb, where mythology and history combine in experimental semi-verse novel forms; this from the same woman who wrote the decisive feminist eco-political text Wild Politics; the same woman who, with her life and business partner Renate...

Where the poet of Byzantium is to be ‘set upon a golden bough to sing / of what is past, or passing, or to come’, Crankhandle’s poet, temporally alert and conscious of finitude, opens with a nod each to past, present and future as speculations of the writing moment: how did it go what’s it like what’s next The commitment is to writing as a physical act that happens now and thus the verbal arrangements—notes—have the responsive flexibility of improvisation, each moment open...

I was surprised to learn that this wonderfully refreshing small magazine has been going for ten years. It is the latest in a long list of independent periodicals produced by Collective Effort Press (CEP) since the 1970s. In the editorial, poet and editor TT.O. ruminates on the possibility of further issues being dependent on subscribers and buyers, so I encourage you to subscribe to this unheralded gem of Oz lit. At $10 an issue it’s the bargain of the decade! In this review of the tenth anniv...

When my friend Jann Harry died peacefully in her sleep on Wednesday morning 20 May 2015, after a long and debilitating illness, I realised that I had ‘known’ her for almost thirty years. When the Age obituary editor asked me what her date of birth was, I wondered if I knew her at all—I certainly did not know her birthday or much about her for that matter. Her poetry often deals with that conundrum: how little any of us really knows about each other. This suggests a few things. First, that ...

The speaker in one of Alex Skovron’s beautifully-wrought poems, this one a sonnet, says ‘The path to wisdom is difficult, rich and mundane.’ Though never a poet of the easy answer or swaggering insight, Skovron’s poetry does constitute, among many other things, a search for wisdom – a search which engages many different poetic forms and voices, which finds expression in a superb array of subtly-differentiated emotional states, and in strikingly diverse cultural registers, from ‘diffi...

The multi-award winning poet and novelist David Musgrave founded the independent publishing company Puncher and Wattmann in 2005. Its name derives from Lucky’s soliloquy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In ten years, the press has produced some one hundred and ten books and established itself as a significant and reputable presence in the Australian cultural landscape. Though poetry titles constitute about three-quarters of the Puncher and Wattmann list, the press has also published literary ...

Angela Costi, Lost in Mid-Verse. ISBN 0977543323. Owl Publishing, Melbourne. RRP$10 Dimitris Tsaloumas, A Winter Journey. ISBN 0977543315. Owl Publishing, Melbourne. RRP$10 § The two chapbooks under review are published by Owl Publishing, an independent concern whose mission is to publish works by selected Greek-Australian writers. Many of the books are in bilingual form. The Tsaloumas reviewed here is one such example. Angela Costi was born in Australia to parents who migrated from C...

Chris Mooney-Singh’s recent poetry collection: The Bearded Chameleon (2011) explores cultural immersion after long years living in Asia as a convert to Sikhism. The Laughing Buddha Cab Company (2007) looks at Asia through a series of taxi rides. His fiction has appeared in The Best of South-East Asian Erotica, The Best of Singapore Erotica, Love and Lust in Singapore and Crime Search: Singapore. Two short plays were produced for the Singapore Short and Sweet festival in 2008 and 2009. He is pr...

Lessons of the Coffin Sarah Day, Tempo. ISBN: 9781922186379. Glebe, NSW: Puncher & Wattman. RRP. $25.00 In Italian, tempo means ‘time’, and this grand notion is the main theme of Day’s most recent collection. However, as a comparison with earlier titles such as A Madder Dance and Quickening tends to suggest, the word ‘tempo’ can also imply a ‘change of pace’. As it turns out, many of the poems are about the slowing down that accompanies any steady human maturing past the age ...

The Astronomer’s Wife. Dick Alderson Cottesloe, WA: Sunline Press. ISBN 9780980680263 RRP $20. The Astronomer’s Wife by Dick Alderson is an assured and finely crafted first collection of poems. The writing is precise yet never bereft of detail, carefully constructed in terms of forms and line breaks, and employs some wonderfully quick and sly imagery. The author flits between kitchen tables, lemons, boyhood memories, moons and games of scrabble, all with a deft touch and real intimacy of v...

David Malouf. Earth Hour. ISBN 978 0 7022 5013 2. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. RRP$29.95 Civilisation as the fragile veneer of humanity’s essentially primitive nature is a theme running through Malouf’s work all the way back to An Imaginary Life (1978). Now, thirty-five years later in the title poem of his latest collection, we find ourselves sitting in one of civilisation’s most ironic manifestations – ‘moonlit/glass in our McMansions’ – where we wait, as we always ...

Richard James Allen. Fixing the Broken Nightingale. ISBN 9789996542589. Macao: Flying Island & Maxwell NSW: Cerberus. RRP $10 It’s almost seven years since Allen’s last published collection of poetry and, though he does note in the Acknowledgements that a few of the included poems – some in earlier form – have appeared in other poetry publications or on radio broadcasts, I was delighted to hear his voice once more. This present collection explores five themes, framed by prologue a...

New and Selected Poems 1962 - 2012 Charles Simic Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013, Hb. RRP $30.00 US “One of the distinct advantages of growing up in a place where one is apt to find men hung from lamp posts as one walks to school is that it cuts down on grumbling about life as one grows older.” ─ Charles Simic (277) Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938. As a child he witnessed the chaos and carnage of daily life during World War II. But in his teens he immigrated to the...

Lyn Hard, and Gary Shead (illustrations). ISBN 1 875892 39 7. Sydney: ETT (Editions Tom Thompson), 2013. An edition of 100, with 50 copies signed by the poet and the artist. RRP $30. This is a handsome, elegant book, containing some longer, darker, slower poems than in Hard’s previous books. The high quality of the book’s luxurious, creamy paper (120gsm Conqueror cxu laid) adds to the pleasure of reading. The imagery of the poems is nothing less than wonderfully original. There is a contro...

I’ve been working on ‘A Bird's Guide to Flight’ slowly for a couple of years. I guess it’s a ‘book’ but I’ve started doing so many bits of multimedia for it I’m not sure how it will end up. It started out as a bit of an exploration into the science of flight and where that meets poetry, and it turned into a broader investigation into poetry’s obsession with birds/flight and how they’re/it’s written/not written about. For this poem, I’ve found a number of instructions ...

If you’re an anxious person, I’m sure you’re familiar with the formula. Exercise, eat right, get more sleep, and you can rely on your anxiety to stay at a low hum. Skip these steps and you can rely on it to get louder. At times, it gets a lot louder. Lately, I’ve been trying to make sense of what anxiety’s saying. As it turns out, some of the best translators are the same people so often described as opaque, confusing time-wasters: poets. Sometimes poets come up with direct translati...

On the radio the other day I caught Marilyn Monroe’s version of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. I’d forgotten – if I ever knew – that the introduction went: The French are glad to die for love, They delight in fighting duels. But I prefer a man who lives And gives expensive jewels. One of my darkest secrets is a fondness for musicals, but this isn’t the sort of thing that causes me to catch my breath. As a song lyric, it’s not even ‘poetic’ in the sense that...

Going On This issue of the Australian Poetry Journal carries forward the work of its founding editor Bronwyn Lea, whose inaugural remarks included the observation that ‘To be alert to a beginning is to be aware of departures and entrances: to be filled with the promise of what is to come’. So it is with this edition, which signals some variations on entering and departing. Bronwyn got the journal up and running, with a formal elegance that reflected her personal and poetic style. I trust t...

Sai dov’ è Dio? I was asked when I first encountered Montale’s poetry. Do you know where God is? It was 1963, I was twenty-three and in Florence, my first time out of Australia. I had taken a few weeks getting to Florence, via Rome, from Naples, where I had disembarked after a three-week boat passage. Florence was where I spent most of a year, and discovered Montale’s poetry. Do you know where God is? Montale’s little poem asked me. Called Vento sulla Mezzaluna, or ‘Wind on the Cresce...