Jordie Albiston’s seventh poetry collection—the Book of Ethel—is a woman’s life journey delicately and diligently distilled into a slim volume of verse. Ethel is Albiston’s great grandmother, who immigrated to Australia from Cornwall with her family in the late 1800s at the age of fifteen. measles diphtheria di- arrhoea words I hear thro the Night …
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A few years ago, Melbourne Books began compiling the country’s prize-winning stories and publishing them in an annual collection called, Award Winning Australian Writing (AWAW). Last year, they added poems to the mix. It’s such a wonderful idea I don’t know why it wasn’t done sooner. The series is now in its fifth year. There are…
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There are some prize-winning books, which, to be honest, after reading, I haven’t felt any wiser as to why they received the accolades emblazoned on their covers. But it’s hard to miss what’s extraordinary about Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. It blew me away with Big Bang impact. It’s clear why this book won…
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It’s like the Australian poetry scene’s twelve-monthly check-up; the so-called “best” of the year’s poems, as chosen from around three thousand submissions, with a little over one hundred making the cut. It is John Tranter’s second and final year as editor of the series, which changes editors regularly to keep the collections fresh. In his…
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By Bronwyn Lovell ‘His words stand alone as poetry’, says Ray Purvis from The West Australian on the first page, and the blurb on the back cover claims ‘Don’t Start Me Talking comprises some of the finest poetry written in Australia’. I both agree and disagree with these statements. The way the lyrics appear on…
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The Sunlit Zone refers to that layer of ocean where the light penetrates, above the dark depths. Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel is aptly named. It is lilting and tidal. Its lyric language is lively, playful, and yet dares to dip into the darkness that dwells under the surface of ordinary lives. This is an incredibly…
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Writing is often seen, and used, as a healing process for people who have endured traumatic experiences in their lives. By expressing what they have been through on paper, it has been found that this enables people to process what has happened to them and start to move forward. Stepping into the Sunshine is a…
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My first experience reading a verse novel was with Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado, which I was forced to read for uni. I was pretty intrigued by the concept at the time, yet while I was reading the book, I couldn’t quite fathom why that particular story couldn’t have been written in prose. Thankfully, I’ve now…
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