Brian Johnstone’s third collection, Dry Stone Work, is prefaced by a quote from Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk: “The stones we writers use are words…” The collection is then divided into four sections, each named for a different aspect of dry stone walling: “Footings”, “Tracings”, “Heartings”, and “Copings”. Across the four sections, concepts of artifice and Read More
“This is the story of what happens when Issy Bradley dies.” Printed large on the inside of the dust jacket, this is the sentence we read before we reach the first page of Carys Bray’s A Song for Issy Bradley. This is the story of a Mormon family’s struggle to deal with the death of Read More
“Do not judge a book by its cover” would be a highly useful warning for the potential reader, who might be put off by the extreme vagueness of the title. Any concern that the content of the novel might be some kind of abstract, pseudo-existential pretentiousness is absolutely ungrounded. On the contrary, the eponymous Book Read More
Harold Pinter once remarked that silences were revelatory spaces “below the word spoken”. The last essay in Kei Miller’s Writing Down the Vision, “A space between the poems” turns on the word “space”; Miller’s incantatory repetition of the word, turning it around this way and that to pick up nuances of meaning, crafts a perfect Read More
Joseph P. Wood’s Fold of the Map has a consistency of voice which is at once brutal and reflective, encouraging a range of open associations through a style which can only be described as consistently fragmentary. At times, especially when the poems are read aloud, the speaker flits between a sensory bombardment with descriptions of Read More
On September 13th, 1940, the Ellerman Line ship “the S.S. City of Benares’”set sail from Liverpool for Canada. Among the passengers on board were 90 evacuee children. Late in the evening, on September 17th, the ship was sighted by a German U-boat, which fired two torpedoes. The torpedoes missed, but just after midnight, a third Read More
If one were to look for extensive fire metaphors in Notes for Lighting a Fire, one would most likely be disappointed. Gerry Cambridge’s first poetry collection in eight years is not so much interested in fire itself, but rather what its origins are, what effects it has, and perhaps most importantly, the consequences of its Read More
Richard Flanagan’s novel is written in tribute to his father who survived the horrors of working on the Thailand to Burma railway. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is largely written through the perspective of an Australian surgeon called Dorrigo Evans; it comprises three main arenas, each with its own distinct emotional and physical Read More