Cirrus@Austlit

'As digital photography proliferates in the contemporary world, theorists and creative writers continue to debate what photographs signify and how the poetic ekphrasis of photographs should be understood. This has become a pressing issue in an age when new technologies allow the easy manipulation of digital images – which, depending on the context in which they are viewed, are increasingly being characterised as creative, imaginative, unreliable or deceptive. Yet nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century theorists tended to assume that photographs had a direct, if complex, relationship to observable, external reality, something reiterated by Susan Sontag as late as 1977. This paper discusses how ekphrastic poems by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin enshrine assumptions about photography that are now shifting, and how contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs increasingly challenge, sometimes subversively, photography’s link to the ‘real’. Such poetry continues to emphasise the way photographs connote a ‘chasm’ or ‘thickening’ of time but are more troubled than earlier authors by the idea that photographs may not represent anything clear or knowable. Eve Joseph’s and Leslie Scalapino’s poetry demonstrates ways in which photographs tend to juxtapose a sense of transience with a new sense of photography’s sometimes obdurate problematics.' (Publication abstract)

'Tracing the verse novel back to C. J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1909–15), the chapter argues that the form has been particularly vibrant and popular in Australia, including among children and young adults. It then examines prose poetry, including microliterature, arguing for its significance in addressing the quotidian, questions of identity, and feminism. The chapter considers how prose poetry accommodates engagements with other forms and systems of knowledge, such as art, music, science, and mathematics, and its capacity for defamiliarisation and the uncanny. Lastly, the chapter considers poetic or verse biography, from the explorer narratives of the mid twentieth century to experimentation with life-writing more recently. It foregrounds intersections with documentary poetry and creative engagements with the archive, including scope to critique and resist colonial histories.'

Source: Abstract.

'A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.' (Introduction)

'Seams of Repair is a captivating collection of lineated poetry and prose poetry that write into ‘the lacuna that grief brings’ (‘Residue’). Dedicated to Stephanie Green’s grandmother, ‘who understood why words matter’, Seams of Repair provides a lyrical lexicon of intimacies, giving priority to the demotic and quotidian in impressive moments of sehnsucht. The collection’s focus on the interplay and unfolding of language demonstrates Green’s passion for quiet nuance and striking visual imagery in stark expressions of desire and absence. '  (Introduction)

'In this anthology of microliterature over forty writers reflect on the theme of remnant in contexts ranging from the natural world and the urban environment through to the personal and the political. Each contribution, at less than a page in length, celebrates with concision and creativity the persistence of what's valuable.

'Remnant includes pieces by commissioned well-known writers from Australia and abroad as well as new voices unearthed through the national Microlit Award named in honour of experimental poet, joanne burns. Introduction by innovative writer and poet, Hazel Smith.' (Publication summary)

'In this volume, five prose poets explore the Five major oceans as they are currently classified: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Southern and the Arctic. Each 21-part sequence of poems is a particular-and sometimes oblique-rumination on one of these vast bodies of water. Together they offer an inspiring and sometimes troubling exploration of our relationship with what is, essentially, a single oceanic entity.'  (Publication summary)

'Poetry as an art form has traditionally registered tropes of feeling and memory, often with astonishing power, especially since the Romantics began to focus on projections of the self. Yet, when poetry invokes memory, anchoring people to their pasts and identities, it frequently reveals that, at best, memory offers a precarious connection to what is certain or secure – and this is particularly the case for women writers. For example, much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry reveals that memory’s recesses are often uncomfortable, and studies in autobiographical memory confirm poetry’s intuition that all may not be what it seems within the “house” of the recollecting self. This paper explores ways in which poetry’s elusive suggestiveness, and memory’s more fraught instances, confirm the provisionality and precarity of what most people are inclined to take for granted – that they know themselves and can speak securely of who they are. This has always been a challenge for women in patriarchal societies as gender inequality and precarious work – often in atypical employment – has informed and affected their expressions of self and identity. We conclude with examples from the work of two contemporary women poets, Emma Hyche and Mary A. Koncel, in order to focus on their particular approaches to precarity in their poetry and prose poetry and to posit that women poets often disrupt and disturb aspects of the patriarchal language system to offer new constructions of autobiographical memory.' (Publication abstract)

'Jill Jones has given many interviews about her poetry where, inevitably, an interviewer asks her, ‘What is Australian poetry?’ In one of my favourite quips, Jones says, ‘Is it only Australians who worry about what is “Australian” poetry?’ Related issues are addressed in her pithy foreword to her second volume of new and selected poems, Acrobat Music. She states, ‘I realise, and others have said, my work doesn’t fit easily into a specified school, category or type of Australian poetry.’ This provides a fortifying manifesto to her oeuvre, reflecting Jones’s interest in ‘the possibilities of the poem … form, sound, connotation, address’.' (Introduction)

'Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.' (Introduction)

'Although James A.W. Heffernan influentially defines contemporary ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (1993, 3), we argue for a more dynamic and fluid understanding of ekphrasis. In particular, we focus on the multiple and indeterminate perspectives created by ekphrastic poetry, emphasising the way ekphrastic poetry develops complex and interart relationships that cause a fracturing and/or stretching in the perspectives of both the poem and the artwork(s) it invokes. A powerful in-between or liminal ekphrastic space is created in which meanings tug, pull, swirl and merge. As new meanings are created ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, Victor W. 1979. “Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, 234–243. New York: Harper and Row, 234), an ekphrastic point of view emerges, problematising and questioning both-artworks-at-once and highlighting the provisional as it probes what can possibly be said in language about modes of artistic representation in artworks. Additionally, because poetic ekphrasis cannot fully represent, and always reinterprets, another artwork, it is engaged in processes of substitution through which poetic tropes stand in for some of the content of the original artwork. In applying these ideas to the relationships of ekphrastic prose poems to works of visual art, we explicate works by David Grubbs and Lorette C. Luzajic, as well as our own ekphrastic prose poetry.' (Publication abstract)