Cirrus@Austlit

'We are delighted at the response to Issue 7 – Memoir. It’s our biggest yet with over 500 poems received from near and far: every continent represented, except for Antarctica and South America.

'It’s very clear to us that women poets wanted to write and share poems for this Memoir issue that ‘resonate with the desire or compulsion to revisit, relive, interrogate, reinterpret, record and recreate the past’.

'The provocation is consonant with the times we are living through. Poets used it as an opportunity to look back, to explore many different memories. A compelling trigger for reflection, speculation, reconciliation and closure but for some it led to uncomfortable, disturbing and challenging memories and often raw personal writing.

'It was a great privilege to read the submissions and a very difficult task to narrow down the choices for publication. This is a weighty Issue in every sense. A very diverse collection of eighty poems that ranges from narratives to short lyrics in a variety of forms drawing upon direct experience and the transformative effect of poetry.

'We want to thank sincerely every poet who submitted their poems to Issue 7 of Not Very Quiet.

'We also want to acknowledge the poets who contributed audio recordings of readings of their poems and thank Melinda Smith who contributed a review article of collections by the four Canberra-based Not Very Quiet editors. Finally, we thank guest editor Anne Casey and feature artist Teena McCarthy for their substantial contributions to this issue.' (Moya Pacey and Sandra Renew, The past is all about us and within https://not-very-quiet.com/2020/09/14/the-past-is-all-about-us/)

'This new anthology of Australian and New Zealand poetry is remarkable for its exuberance, its vitality, and the notably youthful vibrancy of its free verse as well as its innovative prose poetry.  Including a wide range of voices from such well-known poets as John Kinsella, Pam Brown, and John Tranter to relative new-comers like Chris Tse and essa may ranapiri, The Language in my Tongue is full of surprises and special pleasures.

—Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English
 at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor
 of English Emerita at the University of Southern California

'Here are vernaculars. Here are modern-day classics. Here is a “mind in an unclear world,” “a space perfection will never survive.”  Here is invention permitted to travel the world, in dense prose poems and in chatty ones, in capable free verse and ghazals, “emissaries” and “a russet lock in an envelope.” Here Echnida meets the Spider, “making things transparent,” and here [is] bodily frailty and erotic love. Here, readers, are some highlights of the Antipodes, two—no, far more than two—poetic traditions, made available for you. Investigate. Drink deep.

—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University'  (Publication summary)