“Through spare, vivid images, Leber deftly conveys a sense of the immediacy of history, the materiality of myth, and the way that the singular detail can convey a truth that is timeless and universal.”
The full review, in the April edition of Text, can be found here.
The Yellow Emperor can be purchased here.
“Leber is a Melbourne-based poet and a clinician of Chinese medicine, and in this, her second volume of poetry, she merges the two practices in an archaeological translation of Han mythology that finds it art through listening to the body. The work, part verse-novel, part poetic mythography, imagines the origins of the Yellow Emperor legend by dramatising the core principles of Chinese medicine. The project is certainly impressive in scope, a daring and highly ambitious application of the diagnostic art to the purpose of mythological reconstruction.”
The full review, published in Cordite, can be found here.
The Yellow Emperor can be purchased here.
“Breaking New Sky, a new collection of poems selected and translated by Ouyang, presents work from forty-six established and emerging Chinese (including Taiwanese) poets, born predominantly between the late 50s and 80s (though some as early as 1913 and as late as 2002). The collection’s title – a play on the Western idiom “breaking new ground” – connotes innovation, originality, and also risk. It embodies contemporary Chinese poetry’s iconoclasm, as well as Ouyang’s desire to introduce “something new” into the Australian literary landscape.”
The full review, published in Mascara Literary Review, can be found here.
Breaking New Sky can be purchased here.
“Leber is adept at suggesting characteristics of the Chinese ‘original’, as it were, while generating compelling poetry in modern English…The Yellow Emperor is a strange but curiously satisfying achievement.”
The full review, published in both the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, can be found here.
The Yellow Emperor can be purchased here.
“The kinship Elvey forges between her poems and ecological criticism lends both rigour and reverence to her first full-length collection of poetry. There is a radiant stasis at the core of her poems that encourages the reader to listen to the susurration of multiple, overlapping conversations to which Elvey is contributing.”
The full review, published in Cordite, can be found here.
Kin can be purchased here.
“The poems of Anne Elvey’s Kin, dedicated to her father, elaborate on the title, productively making it stand for blood and other kinds of relation. There’s a level of intimate observation to these empathic poems that marks Elvey as a contemporary of poets such as John Anderson.”
The full review, published in The Australian, can be found here.
Kin can be purchased here.
“Kin is Anne Elvey’s first full collection, following on from three chapbooks, and its maturity shows. Though, as with any first collection, its manner and content can vary somewhat, Elvey’s book is consistently doing things only poetry can do. In her case, this involves significant environmental and religious dimensions but there is no unwelcome preaching.”
The full review, published in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times, can be found here.
Kin can be purchased here.
“Kin, Anne Elvey’s first full collection of poetry, brings together a wide range of poems full of light and the acuity of close attention. These poems focus on a world of interrelationships where tree and water, creature and human, air and breathing, coexist – suggestive of an underlying philosophy of humility and acceptance.”
The full review, published in ABR, can be found here.
Kin can be purchased here.
“‘Now You Shall Know’, a poem filled with complex imagery, painful dialogue and dramatic verve, won the Newcastle Poetry Prize and is [Compton’s] latest eponymous poetry collection. The book is divided into six different sections, entitled in turn: awaiting our delivery, oh, a rapt downwards look, in the long run, wrenched backwards, and, somehow urgent. These poems concern themselves with aspects of family life and with themes of loss, grief, change, and memory.”
The full review, published in Rochford Street Review, can be found here.
Now You Shall Know can be purchased here.
“Jennifer Compton’s new collection, Now You Shall Know, has an early late-career energy about it – and a focus on what is really important. Not for her the post-postmodern language games. As she notes at the end of her autobiographical poem, ‘We are farmed out’, Compton has long been a ‘noticing kind of child’ and her hands-on expertise includes not only horse riding, gardening and playwriting but human nature generally – particularly in its familial embodiments.”
The full review, published in The Sydney Morning Herald, can be found here.
Now You Shall Know can be purchased here.
“This book contains microcosms of alertness to the oddity of language as language, the arbitrary way meaning is distorted or inflected by unfamiliar acts of repetition, the use of phrases grammatically correct but somehow socially bizarre/inept, or the inappropriate use of passive or active voice.”
“The playful self-deprecation in this book feels honest without being earnest, self-critical without being self-effacing; subtle but showy.”
“Reasserting the value of the subject in the living world seems to be a driving mission of the verse. Whether or not we can describe the ineffable, or comprehend it, to exist is to know the ineffable exists. This book is a celebration, a condemnation, and a defiant incitement to go with boldness, to be amongst it.”
The full review, published in Cordite, can be found here.
Fainting with Freedom can be purchased here.
It is with great pride that we see Ouyang Yu’s superb collection Fainting with Freedom featuring on three ‘Best of 2015′ lists from the following readers:
Authors on the Readings bookstore website.
John Kinsella in ABR:
“Ouyang Yu’s work continues to astonish me with its shifts and range, and Fainting with Freedom (Five Islands Press) is among his finest work.”
Alex Miller in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian:
“Deceptively simple and direct, Ouyang Yu’s language in Fainting with Freedom (5 Islands Press) challenges and mystifies, leading us into dark places where sudden shafts of understanding engulf us. Wisdom and beauty speak side by side here. It is poetry of a double voice arising from two equal languages. His brilliant insights are directed towards the self, his own self, the most devastating and the most revealing of them leading to something that is the nature of his own truth. It is a rich truth in which the Australian he has become is brother to the Chinese soul from which the deepest tones of his unique voice are sounded. The freedom of the title is a dangerous and a sublime place for this poet. Ouyang’s is a poetry that never strains after its own centre but leaves a silence rich in meaning and even menace, and always of mystery, like the still centre of a storm, where the sense of his words is held in that perfection we call poetry, the silence between the words. An utterly satisfying collection. Some of the finest poetry ever written in this country. What is most absurd is most often where Yu finds his eloquence, his inspiration arising from a place of contradiction and profound empathy. This is his most powerful collection yet.”
Fainting with Freedom can be purchased here.
“Though a playful exploration of the sounds, textures and semantics of English and Chinese languages, this collection hints at a deeper ambiguity with the world and how we make meaning of and in it.”
“Most enjoyable about this collection is the way it often borrows the language of profundity only to almost immediately cut it down at the knees. It’s poetry that is wry, curly, tonal and suspicious of platitudes.”
The full review, published in Overland, can be found here.
Fainting with Freedom can be purchased here.
“Fainting with Freedom includes prose poems, easy-to-read lyric poems, strange disjointed poems, thin poems, wide poems, long and short poems, poems that speak plainly and poems that cut up words. What’s consistent is the sense of control, maintained and relinquished. Yu’s precise lines, steady, speech-like rhythms, logical sequences of related ideas give way to absurd associations, unexpected images, wildness. These two modes of writing are kept in balance, each used to upset the other.”
The full review, published in The Australian, can be found here.
Fainting with Freedom can be purchased here.
“The poems in Fainting with Freedom emphasize that empathy is not sameness, just as dwelling should not be confused with belonging, nor language with unity. Rather, the ‘state’ to which Yu belongs is the poem itself.”
The full review, published in Jacket2, can be found here.
Fainting with Freedom can be purchased here.
“Ouyang Yu’s Fainting with Freedom is soap-bubble language. It lives halfway between being and becoming, full of conversational breath, reflective of the mind that created it, bilingual and annoyed, bored and shocked at its own boredom.”
The full review, published in Text, can be found here.
Fainting with Freedom can be purchased here.
