Cirrus@Austlit

' In 2021 I reviewed Solace, Graham Henderson’s last poetry collection, an anthology compiled from forty years of poetry. I am now pleased to be able to review Devotional Poems, Graham’s latest book, published this year. Graham, who I missed out on meeting due to his ill health, is a friend of Kieran Carroll, a poet/playwright friend of mine. I launched Kieran’s first book of poetry in Sydney many years ago and despite him living in Melbourne and me living in Sydney, with all the artistic disparities this can entail, we have stayed connected ever since. Kieran made the switch from poet to playwright early on. Graham, as I mentioned in my last review, received much past acclaim for his novel The Mountain. Apart from this and poetry he has also written short stories, novellas and a number of plays.'  (Introduction)

'Having reflected for many years on his motivation for writing poetry and the subjects that obsess him, Mark realises that his writing primarily involves memorialising and eulogising the overlooked and forgotten. Not only people but places and objects. He is driven by the weight of his forebears’ historical loss. Loss of family, of identity, of homeland. This loss has been handed down like an heirloom.' (Publication summary)

'Solace is a small collection given it has been winnowed from close to forty years of work. This either implies that Graham Henderson has not written many poems or that the selection has been extremely judicious.' (Introduction)

‘In Mark Mahemoff’s Urban Gleanings the routine of the urban commute, punctured by fragile incidents and ruminations, is interspersed with poems drumming against mortality, such as the refugees whose “corpses washed to shore / all in the same boat”. Many poems are shaded by nostalgia and a tinkering unease: an old garage where 'dreams often end up in mothballs', parents and children cagily circling each other, or watching balloons 'disappear into their past'. As well as these segmented descriptions of daily life demarcated by a crowded metropolis, two long centos chronicle some recent Australian injustices.’ - Gig Ryan

Urban Gleanings is an urbane collection that manages to be both sophisticated as verse and open-hearted as poetry. To 'glean' is to seek what is left behind, overlooked, deemed superfluous but which yet sustains the gleaner, who patiently works the fields others have forsaken. In this manner, Mark Mahemoff scrutinises the ground of our living and uncovers what is valuable in it. What we, in our turn, discover is that these poems - these gleanings - are in fact the true harvest itself, its rich abundance laid out before us as his gift.’ - Paul Kane

This book is remarkable for the humanity of its content and austerity of its language. It is a constant going out of itself into the experience of others. Family, friends and strangers are seen for themselves in an effort of sympathy. The style is entirely appropriate to what is said, opening out possibilities from one line to the next. There is a drive to make sense of experience and then offer that as a new experience in the form of poetry. The impulse to remember is richly present. To memorialise the overlooked or unseen is the constant intention. Words pick up words through subtle rhyming and alliteration demonstrating interconnection, the abiding theme. - Robert Gray' (Publication Summary)