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Louise Nicholas’s ‘The List of Last Remaining’ reviewed by Lucy Dougan

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‘Louise Nicholas’s The List of Last Remaining very satisfyingly brings together a substantial body of her work. Its five, intelligently ordered sections each rise up to enact their shimmering, persuasive world and then fade out to make way for the next.’

The full review, published in Cordite, can be found here.

The List of Last Remaining can be purchased here.


John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Poems’ reviewed by William Yeoman

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‘Modulation is here used in its musical sense of changing key. But the dominant metaphor of the Graphology Poems — the home key, if you will — is the concept of graphology itself. Like other WA poets such as Nandi Chinna and Annamaria Weldon, Kinsella writes the land and himself in the process.’

‘There is something of the calligraphic quality of Fred Williams’ landscapes here, or Lee Krasner’s dense calligraphic Little Image paintings of the late 1940s.
But there is also the idea of the poet as seismologist, ever alert to slippages of meaning and moralities rather than tectonic plates, and of the ensuing shock waves.’

‘If you don’t know [Kinsella’s] fiercely political, deeply humane poetry, which like its maker or indeed any of us is capable of being simple and direct or complicated and abstruse, there’s never been a better time than now to change that.’

The full review, published in The West Australian can be found here.

Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 can be purchased here.

Louise Nicholas’s ‘The List of Last Remaining’ reviewed by Mark Roberts

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The List of Last Remaining is a book that deserves to be read more than once. While it contains many very fine individual poems, its greatest strength is perhaps how well the poems work together, how each section creates a micro-climate of imagery, and how, the book as a whole brings this all together so that a reader is left with a feeling of completeness.’

The full review, published in Rochford Street Review, can be found here.

The List of Last Remaining can be purchased here.

John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Poems’ reviewed by Thom Sullivan

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‘“Graphology”, Kinsella reminds us in his introductory notes, is a pseudoscience that claims that aspects of personality can be deduced by analysing a person’s handwriting. It requires an examination of form, movement and use of space, all of which are important stylistic and thematic considerations within the Graphology poems.’

‘The energies and impulses of the poems, or clusterings of poems, remain in flux, creating a sense of impermanence or capriciousness. It requires some trust that an individual poem, or clustering of poems, is of-a-piece with the sequence, and creates a sustained tension in the work. A resistance to closure also allows the sequence’s inclusiveness of reference, from the organic to the cultural, which is itself an exploration and substantiation of identity.’

The full review, published in Plumwood Mountain can be found here.

Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 can be purchased here.

Robyn Rowland’s ‘This Intimate War’ reviewed by Susan Laura Sullivan

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‘[Rowland] encourages the reader to honour and seek that which nurtures the human spirit, even in reflection of loss, rather than that which neuters connection and denies the intimacy that lies between human and human, human and earth.’

The full review, published in Plumwood Mountain can be found here.

This Intimate War can be purchased here.

John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Poems’ reviewed by David McCooey

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‘Like the landscapes Kinsella so often writes about, Graphology Poems is sprawling, sometimes messy, often imposing, and always compelling.’

‘These lines of poetry are by a writer utterly taken up with the materiality of language, and by the intense, sometimes mysterious processes, in which the material world becomes the stuff of language.’

Graphology Poems is a major publishing event in Australian poetry. In what is surely Kinsella’s magnum opus, we find the dragons and the facts miraculously together on common ground.’

The full review, published in ABR, can be found here.

Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 can be purchased here.

John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Poems’ reviewed by Robert Wood

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‘In his writing, Kinsella is equipped with mercurial turns of phrase, great breadth of reference, skilled and charismatic daring, prolix volubility and topical range.’

‘If readers find in Kinsella and Graphology any fixed idea […] it might simply be a dynamic possibility, which is to say, his output encourages, and necessitates, a response of our own making. Kinsella has been so various and diverse, so energetic that one can find almost whatever one likes in his writing. In that way, it is a question of saying, which Kinsella do I want to read, not do I want to read him at all.’

The full review, published in foam:e, can be found here.

Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 can be purchased here.

Stuart Cooke’s ‘Opera’ reviewed by Rachel Mead

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‘In the poems of Opera, Stuart Cooke attempts to take the writing of place into new territory, and in doing so, accomplishes something remarkable. This collection is both substantial and complex, enhancing our understanding of what a poetics of landscape can encompass and the capacity of language to articulate it.’

The full review, published in Cordite, can be found here.

Opera can be purchased here.


John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Poems’ reviewed by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

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‘Kinsella’s concerns are also about marshalling a sense of the world’s never-containable, protean indeterminacies, channelling them into what one might call the real-unreal of poetic utterance; an utterance that, in Kinsella’s hands is always trying to address large and small things at once, but which knows there is no settling down, never the opportunity for conclusion, and not much that is even temporarily fixed and stable.’

Graphology is about what is false and subversive, just as much as it is about truth. Its use of space and of typography is important to its ruminations on mapping the land and the merging of landscapes; about what is constructed, made, forged (in a number of senses of that word) and destroyed.’

Graphology speaks to Kinsella’s preoccupation with finding something of the poetic almost everywhere he looks, and with making his transformations of language speak of as many different kinds of experiences as he can. This book suggests that acting and speaking are inseparable, and that saying is, in itself, an important part of doing.’

The full review, published in Text, can be found here.

Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 can be purchased here.

Louise Nicholas’s ‘The List of Last Remaining’ reviewed by Niloofar Fanaiyan

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The List of Last Remaining by Louise Nicholas is a collection full of depth and diversity, a narrative of fractures in time where people and places mirror each other and become windows into the human condition.’

The full review, published in Text, can be found here.

The List of Last Remaining can be purchased here.

John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Poems’ reviewed by David Caddy

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‘The sheer width of Kinsella’s anti-pastoral, eco-poetic wordscapes is a delight and challenge to the reader.’

The full review, published in Tears in the Fence (UK), can be found here.

Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 can be purchased here.

Lyn Hatherly’s ‘Many, and One’ reviewed by Ron Pretty

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‘[Lyn’s] awareness of the natural world, the wonder of it, permeates the whole collection: the earth and everything in it, and everything on it is her text, how all of it’s connected, all of it is to be celebrated, insect, bird and animal, humans and our place in it, the love of partner, child and parent, the awareness of our origins, mythical and scientific; and where it is all headed. One, and Many indeed.’

The full review, published in Rochford Street Review, can be found here.

Many, and One can be purchased here.

Stuart Cooke’s ‘Opera’ reviewed by Caitlin Maling

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‘In Opera parts of the world appear, and as readers we are placed amongst them as Cooke’s music teaches us how we might sing and move as one of a chorus.’

The full review, published in Plumwood Mountain, can be found here.

Opera can be purchased here.

Jill Jones’s ‘Brink’ reviewed by Toby Fitch

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‘The poems…in all their multiplicity, evoke and explore being on the brink – of knowing, feeling, sensing, and making sense’

The full review, published in ABR, can be found here.

Brink can be purchased here.

Rose Hunter’s ‘glass’ reviewed by Angela Gardner

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‘These are highly polished and controlled poems wielded with great skill and a consequent audacity that comes from getting it right.’

The full review, published in foam:e, can be found here.

glass can be purchased here.


Gayelene Carbis’s ‘Anecdotal Evidence’ reviewed by Geoff Page

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‘[Anecdotal Evidence is] a book that holds closely and authentically to the frustrating complexity of life as we live it, especially within families and relationships.’

The full review, published in The Australian, can be found here.

Anecdotal Evidence can be purchased here.

Gayelene Carbis’s ‘Anecdotal Evidence’ reviewed by Autumn Royal

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‘The poetry in this collection spans between the ‘anecdotal’ and the ‘evidenced’ and, given the prejudiced readings of women’s writing, it calls for a new verdict rather than an expected one.’

The full review, published in TEXT, can be found here.

Anecdotal Evidence can be purchased here.

Rose Hunter’s ‘glass’ reviewed by Kishore Ryan

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glass is a collection of elegiac poems, a memoir of free verse about the poet’s travels through Mexico and her own debilitating ailment.’

The full review, published in Cordite, can be found here.

glass can be purchased here.

Jill Jones’s ‘Brink’ reviewed by J.M. Schreiber

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‘The poems in this collection, which range from the lyrical to the linguistic and experimentally playful, examine the emotions, images, and concerns that reflect an awareness of place and of the passage of time on an increasingly small planet.’

The full review, published in roughghosts, can be found here.

Brink can be purchased here.

Rose Hunter’s ‘glass’ reviewed by Mags Webster

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‘At the centre of these poems is a roaming exile – the source of a rich and chaotic geography. Twenty-one poems in three sections – ‘mexico city’, ‘jalisco’ and ‘brisbane’ – piece together a map of encounters, places, relationships, and selves, which are themselves refracted through various manifestations of glass: windows, marbles, mirrors, vodka bottles and, perhaps most significantly, the sliding doors of memory and chance.’

The full review, published in TEXT, can be found here.

glass can be purchased here.

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