Cirrus@Austlit

'Sarah Holland-Batt has truly disappointed with her stewardship of Best Australian Poems 2016. She did not follow her own guidelines for submissions, and thereby misled every poet submitting to this anthology, resulting in the omission of at least thirty poets who could have been included.' (Introduction)

'Someone gave me, as a Christmas present, Mark Tedeschi’s book Murder at Myall Creek. It is not a bad read, though some things are left unexplained, and the book has no index. My criticism of the book arises from its somewhat dubious scholarship.' (Introduction)

'With one small qualification I’ll come to, I enjoyed this book. It comprises twenty-five pages of illustration followed by twenty-six poems, and the integration of the two art forms is most skilfully done. Indeed, if artfulness were not in its present epoch of beggary, then the exquisite watercolour illuminations of shells and marine mortuary here, together with these shapely poems, might merit being placed within a finessed sample of bookcraft, hardcover, saddle-stitched, marbled endpapers and tasselled bookmark such as that quiet craftsman Alec Bolton used to create on his Brindabella Press. But the paperback we have from RMIT University Link yields a volume workaday and effective enough. In the first half of the book it displays nautilus, cone shell, seahorse, conch, each with an arresting singularity on a creamy page, while the poems that commence halfway through disclose Morgan-Shae’s commitment to the wrought-ness of verbal art, shapeliness as a presence-in-words for ear, eye and intellect.' (Introduction)

'I n winter in Hamburg—the busiest port in Europe—when gangways are slippery and frozen handrails take the skin off an ungloved hand, when the wind along the Elbe is like a razor around your ears, and in the many harbour channels where traffic is least, you can find sheets of ice as big as a tabletop which rock and clack together as barges and tenders and tugs nudge their way through, and snowdrifts pile up at the entrance to our shipping office at the dockside.' (Introduction)