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y separately published work icon The Espionage Act : New Poems selected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 The Espionage Act : New Poems
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Espionage Act is the new poetry collection by the internationally renowned author, Jennifer Maiden. With her characteristic clear, powerful focus and crisp but sumptuous lyrical style, she analyses espionage in many senses, from the U.S. 1917 Espionage Act to the reflections on the Deep State, to tactical levels in conservative espionage, to its sexuality of fear, to covert promotion and funding of experimental art, to its reactions to primal digital technology, and to the mind itself in its acts of espionage.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Penrith, Penrith area, Sydney Outer West, Sydney, New South Wales,: Quemar Press , 2020 .
      image of person or book cover 4588450137309387103.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 84p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 31 January 2020
      ISBN: 9780648555223 (pbk), 9780648555230 (ebk)

Works about this Work

Personal Histories Geoff Page , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 2 January 2021; (p. 18)

— Review of Steles Tom Petsinis , 2019 selected work poetry ; Smoke Miriel Lenore , 2019 selected work poetry ; Nganajungu Yagu Charmaine Papertalk-Green , 2019 selected work poetry ; The Espionage Act : New Poems Jennifer Maiden , 2020 selected work poetry
Fringes of Sleep James Jiang , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 419 2020; (p. 41)

— Review of The Espionage Act : New Poems Jennifer Maiden , 2020 selected work poetry

'W.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion. Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’. But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news. But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit. For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.' (Introduction)

Fringes of Sleep James Jiang , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 419 2020; (p. 41)

— Review of The Espionage Act : New Poems Jennifer Maiden , 2020 selected work poetry

'W.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion. Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’. But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news. But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit. For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.' (Introduction)

Personal Histories Geoff Page , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 2 January 2021; (p. 18)

— Review of Steles Tom Petsinis , 2019 selected work poetry ; Smoke Miriel Lenore , 2019 selected work poetry ; Nganajungu Yagu Charmaine Papertalk-Green , 2019 selected work poetry ; The Espionage Act : New Poems Jennifer Maiden , 2020 selected work poetry
Last amended 20 Jul 2020 11:25:22
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