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y separately published work icon Thorn selected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Thorn
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Todd Turner’s second book, Thorn, is an expansive and intimate collection whose poems open out with a strong and developed voice to encompass a broad range of subject matter. There are odes and elegies, stunning evocations of birds and animals, a sequence of elegant engagements with the work of influential poets, the rough and tumble of personal history and deep immersions in place. This is a poet with a reverence for the power of language who engages the large and small particulars of the world with intense resolve and resounding clarity.'

Source: publisher's blurb

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Glebe, Glebe - Leichhardt - Balmain area, Sydney Inner West, Sydney, New South Wales,: Puncher and Wattmann , 2020 .
      image of person or book cover 4466734692048131396.png
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 80p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Publication date 01 Jun 2020
      ISBN: 9781925780635

Works about this Work

Numinous Wellings : Three New Poetry Volumes Anders Villani , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 427 2020;

— Review of Cadaver Dog Luke Best , 2020 single work novel ; Thorn Todd Turner , 2020 selected work poetry ; Some Sketchy Notes on Matter Angela Gardner , 2020 selected work poetry

'In 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’ For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans’ division from a utopian natural world suggests the biblical fall, strike a chord in our own time of unfolding environmental catastrophe. Against such an unfolding, three new Australian books of poetry explore the contemporary relationship of subject to place.' (Introduction)

Caitlin Wilson Reviews Thorn by Todd Turner Caitlin Wilson , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;

— Review of Thorn Todd Turner , 2020 selected work poetry

'Todd Turner’s Thorn mines the relationship between the earth and the things which populate it, musing on their motives and daily moves. An uneasy symbiosis between animals and people, the natural and the built, is rendered in detail-oriented odes to memory, observation and wonder. In this, his second volume, Thorn re-treads some of the ground of Woodsmoke (2016), reflecting a similar drive to luxuriate in the minutiae of language. The specificity of Turner’s images allows the reader to see through the poetic eye, lending a haptic quality to his creations. There is a clarity and care to each poem, a tiny world where every word is in its right place, even if everything is not. As the collection’s blurb, written by Robert Gray, explains, Turner has much to draw upon in his rendering of a complex world; “a horseman and boxer on one side, a craftsman who creates artistic jewellery for a living on the other”. This eclectic collection of life experiences is reflected in the breadth of this collection, unconstrained by any one influence or vantage point from which to connect to the world around him. ' (Introduction)

Todd Turner : Thorn Martin Duwell , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 15 2020;

— Review of Thorn Todd Turner , 2020 selected work poetry

'A second book always gives readers a chance to see what in the first book was central and what was tangential, stuff to be got out of the way before moving on in one’s poetic career. And Todd Turner’s Thorn begins by making an immediate connection to its predecessor, Woodsmoke. The last poem of that book called “Fieldwork” in a deliberate reference to Seamus Heaney’s poem (and the book it gives its title to) was an extended move down into the detritus of a forest floor, into the lives of beetles and their larvae, nesting in the rotting remains of dead birds. It summarises the recurrent images of leaf-rot and its inhabitants which recur in the poems of that book. But it’s also about the searching as much as the symbolic significance of creative decay, the foul rag and bone shop of a particular heart, and perhaps it’s also about the limits of poetic knowledge. The first poem of Thorn is called “Thread” and is about a similar search, even if the setting is the inside of a person’s body and mind rather than the forest floor.'  (Introduction)

Todd Turner : Thorn Martin Duwell , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 15 2020;

— Review of Thorn Todd Turner , 2020 selected work poetry

'A second book always gives readers a chance to see what in the first book was central and what was tangential, stuff to be got out of the way before moving on in one’s poetic career. And Todd Turner’s Thorn begins by making an immediate connection to its predecessor, Woodsmoke. The last poem of that book called “Fieldwork” in a deliberate reference to Seamus Heaney’s poem (and the book it gives its title to) was an extended move down into the detritus of a forest floor, into the lives of beetles and their larvae, nesting in the rotting remains of dead birds. It summarises the recurrent images of leaf-rot and its inhabitants which recur in the poems of that book. But it’s also about the searching as much as the symbolic significance of creative decay, the foul rag and bone shop of a particular heart, and perhaps it’s also about the limits of poetic knowledge. The first poem of Thorn is called “Thread” and is about a similar search, even if the setting is the inside of a person’s body and mind rather than the forest floor.'  (Introduction)

Caitlin Wilson Reviews Thorn by Todd Turner Caitlin Wilson , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;

— Review of Thorn Todd Turner , 2020 selected work poetry

'Todd Turner’s Thorn mines the relationship between the earth and the things which populate it, musing on their motives and daily moves. An uneasy symbiosis between animals and people, the natural and the built, is rendered in detail-oriented odes to memory, observation and wonder. In this, his second volume, Thorn re-treads some of the ground of Woodsmoke (2016), reflecting a similar drive to luxuriate in the minutiae of language. The specificity of Turner’s images allows the reader to see through the poetic eye, lending a haptic quality to his creations. There is a clarity and care to each poem, a tiny world where every word is in its right place, even if everything is not. As the collection’s blurb, written by Robert Gray, explains, Turner has much to draw upon in his rendering of a complex world; “a horseman and boxer on one side, a craftsman who creates artistic jewellery for a living on the other”. This eclectic collection of life experiences is reflected in the breadth of this collection, unconstrained by any one influence or vantage point from which to connect to the world around him. ' (Introduction)

Numinous Wellings : Three New Poetry Volumes Anders Villani , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 427 2020;

— Review of Cadaver Dog Luke Best , 2020 single work novel ; Thorn Todd Turner , 2020 selected work poetry ; Some Sketchy Notes on Matter Angela Gardner , 2020 selected work poetry

'In 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’ For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans’ division from a utopian natural world suggests the biblical fall, strike a chord in our own time of unfolding environmental catastrophe. Against such an unfolding, three new Australian books of poetry explore the contemporary relationship of subject to place.' (Introduction)

Last amended 12 Jun 2020 12:29:46
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