Cirrus@Austlit

' Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes poetry from and about the female body.

Her opening collection, First Blood was a gritty exploration of girlhood that challenged cultural expectations of ideal femininity. Her second collection If There is a Butterfly continues to centre female bodily experience, taking pregnancy, birth, and motherhood into her orbit.'  (Introduction)

'A Ghost Gum Leans Over by Myron Lysenko, Flying Islands Books 2020, was launched by Alice Wanderer on-line from Melbourne University on 1 November 2023'

'Myron’s haiku are sparse, highly disciplined and written directly from his experience. Each can be read as a whole poem, but four of the five sections in this collection also loosely combine to tell stories. The fifth consists of occasional haiku and includes 33 haiku each dedicated to specific friends.' (Introduction)

'Booranga Writers’ Centre was one of the first of a network of proposed regional writers’ centres in NSW linking e.g. Sydney, Byron Bay, Armidale, Newcastle, Wollongong, Dubbo & Broken Hill. Opened in 1993, Booranga’s distinctive 1896 cottage, on the Wagga Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University, with relative seclusion and close to wine, olives and infrastructure support was a perfect setting for writing (apart from the occasional possum …) Its restoration and make-over, financed by joint contributions of $50,000 from NSW Arts and CSU, created office space, a readings/workshop area and a separate writer’s flat as well as renovated amenities. For some thirty years, funded largely by Create NSW and its predecessors, Booranga has implemented a successful series of writers’ residencies (three or four a year); published an annual anthology of new writing, fourW; collaborated with local educational and arts groups (especially the English Teachers’ Association, the Wagga Wagga City Council and Art Gallery); and fostered the development of regional writers by monthly writing workshops and downtown readings venues.' (Introduction)

'Gemma White dedicates this collection of poems to ‘the man with the Red Hand Files Tattoo.’ I too subscribe to the Red Hand Files, a series of personal letters written by the singer/songwriter Nick Cave, whose personal responses to fans’ questions about life and suffering are thus rendered public and poetic. Like clearly calls to like.' (Introduction)

'Since the year 2000 with the publication of Why I am not a Farmer Brendan Ryan has been ploughing his own fertile patch of the poetic landscape. Feldspar, his seventh collection, (aside from the evocatively titled memoir Walk Like a Cow) treads familiar terrain. Any why not? Dorothy Hewett consistently returned to the West Australian wheat fields of her youth. So too, Ryan returns to the remembered territory of his past.' (Introduction)

'Some books I’m not sure if I consume them or they consume me. Chinese fish has an amazing hypnotic clarity. Page turning, subterranean transitions keep moving me forward, they flow with no catch of air to breathe, a woman’s way book. Grace Yee’s words swim inside into the canals of my life, they are in me in the contemplation in my whole body. Usually, I have to chew on one poem at a time, but Chinese fish is different. The poems represent notions of home through contrasting sounds and sensations that gobbled me whole.' (Introduction)

'When it comes to collaborative artforms, the marrying of literature and visual art seems an obvious one, however the nicheness of its production proves otherwise. Risk-taking publishers like Upswell have accepted the challenge with books like Ann Shenfield’s A Treatment and Anna Jacobson’s Anxious in a Sweet Store, where the poets include their own illustrations to illuminate a single poem’s meaning or emotional weight. They’re more of a hybrid offering than anything experimental if you consider that children’s picture books have been doing it since 1658, when John Amos Comenius published Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), but given it’s poetry and not children’s literature, these collections of poems embrace something almost folk artsy, which is uniquely pleasing. Puncher & Wattmann, too, welcome visual art in their catalogue, though they’ve taken a more avant-garde approach. Richard Tipping’s Hear the Art is the second book in the Visual Poetics series, and unlike the first – Chris Mansell’s 101 Quads: one poem per page with each poem in perfect blocks of black and red-lettered quatrains laid out staircase-style – his isn’t a collection of concrete poetry where the text relies on its visual form. Hear the Art is the artist’s discussion of his own ‘wordartwork’ amid photographs of it, mostly sign art and sculpture dependent on text. Toby Fitch’s Object Permanence is the third in the series, one of calligrams, which harkens back to concrete poetry but lays weight on uses of varying font. Of the three Visual Poetics books, Tipping’s is the explanatory one, in which he writes about how his practice eventuated then evolved, whereas the others are performance-based: their textual-based art is the art, not the topic. Tipping’s 2008 Subvert I Sing with Redfox Press might’ve fit better with Mansell’s and Fitch’s contributions in terms of what the books are doing, but Hear the Art as one part of a whole brings a daring nuance to the series that reflects on visual-based text and text-based visuals as co-conspirators rather than opposites.'  (Introduction)

'I was excited when I first ran across Ellen Shelley’s early poems. Here was a person who approached words and the world with a different slant. Like so many of us, I crave the new in poetry. If she kept on writing I thought this would be a major new voice in Australian poetry.'  (Introduction)