Cirrus@Austlit

Contains a bibliography of the author's published work and text of an interview with the author by Fiona Probyn, as well as Pam Brown's review of Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles, Aitken's short story 'A Walk in the Cross', a selection of his poetry, and his reviews of Patricia Dobrez' Michael Dransfield's Lives and Alan Jefferies' Blood Angels.

'Marcelle Freiman’s collection poems Spirit Level, her third book, surely deserves Jill Jones’ endorsement as a book where ‘clarity of memory [sits] alongside a shimmer of location’, whose ‘presences and absences’ are to be savoured. As restless, dynamic, and ‘unsettled’ as her earlier two collections, White Lines and Monkey’s Wedding, (which I reviewed on its publication). This new collection is structured into two parts, the first contains many poems about memories: of childhood in South Africa, of Freiman’s student days as an anti-Apartheid activist, and of parents and Jewish relatives killed and dispersed by the Holocaust. The second part of the collection explores various subjects, with many poems with Australian locations and subjects, including a number of poems on art and photography. Together the poems provide a vivid picture of the life of a South African migrant now settled in Australia. The deeper theme is the poet’s engagement with the past, not so much as nostalgia, but about how her present sensibility is now ineluctably imbricated with these memories. The poems bring a sense of presence to memory and amplify memory’s affective power, because the affect is often tied to traumatic events.'(Introduction)

'The title of this collection, Revenants, suggests spirits and ghosts who return to the human world through dream and art, not to haunt it, but to remind the living that the present and the past are intertwined. At the heart of the collection is a series of poems about the poet's father, a Melbournian who travelled and worked in Asia as a young man, who married the poet's mother in Bangkok, and whose life and death are commemorated here. The poems have settings in Asia, Australia, Hawai'i, and France, which has become the author's second home. They reflect on the legacy of colonialism, not as theory, but as inherited experience. In them the poet himself may be thought of as a revenant, sharing his awareness of secret histories and local knowledge, stories of migration, the vestiges of forgotten people and places.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Mark Mahemoff’s most recent collection of poems will please a recent critic of Contemporary Australian Poetry, who claimed that there isn’t enough poetry about this city. Mark’s URBAN is my Sydney urban: the train stations are familiar, the aircraft noise, and the people he describes. “This is pure city” he writes, and his poem meticulously distills this quality, which is all out there in the world, but it takes a poet like Mark to find that purity.' (Introduction)