Cirrus@Austlit

Australian ravens is a book of mourning, celebration, family, misgiving, lies and caution. The three long poems in this book, ‘Broken’, ‘Not being in Kyoto’ and ‘The Blue Gum’, each extend the questioning of memory, place and the past that featured in McLaren’s first collection, The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead. Australian ravens reaches deeply into place, making it up, trying to forget it, remembering and misremembering in equal measure, finding…

'Just one of the many really interesting trails that thread through the seeming wilds of Australian poetry over the last two or so decades (cripes, has it been that long?) is the slow, constant morphing one of Cordite. Sydney poets Adrian Wiggins and Peter Minter, founders of Cordite Poetry and Poetics Review, launched their first issue in 1997. After five issues in a broadsheet format and an oscillating editorship that included Margaret Cronin and Jennifer Kremmer, the editorship was handed over in 2005 to David Prater, whose key innovation was to appoint guest editors for mini- and, later, entire issues.'

(Introduction)