Bark On is not an easy-breezy read. It has a bleak and cerebral vibe. It’s equal parts surreal and sophisticated. An edge of grit laces everything, but there’s also poetry in the pages, an example being the terms, “A drowning drive” and “The comas of those commutes” appearing only a page apart.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of the Driftwood Press 2023 Anthology edited by James McNulty & Jerrod Schwarz
The study of process aspect was, at times, quite fascinating and provided greater context to some pieces that either confirmed or clarified my thoughts, or helped me understand more about pieces I didn’t quite grasp the meaning or intention of. In the case of pieces such as Bark On and the poems of Margaret Yapps the fact that they were extracts of larger works explained to me why I felt they were incomplete.
A review of Moon Wrasse by Willo Drummond
All sorts of colours flicker through the book, but particularly blue, from the aqua shore to Iris’ that fall, blue as the rare blue moon, the blue of hope in an indigo night, the bluest carbon of our breath, Brisbane blue, a blue man suit, bluebottles, autumn blue, and of course the blue of the Moon Wrasse also known as the Blue Wrasse. Drummond’s blues are luminescent and rare shades, not normally the colour of a moon, a suit, or autumn, but nocturnally accurate, confounding tropes.
A review of Like to the Lark by Stuart Barnes
The poems are sinuous and sensual, working within the many constrictions and still managing to feel so light and with the strict scansion so subtle and integrated into the rhythm that you have to look closely to realise, for example, that “Persian Love Cake” is a pantoum, its innate rhythms varying slightly, in a deliciously sensual piece of dried rosebuds, green pistachios, almond praline and lemon icing.
A review of No Angels by Mary Makofske
There is so much more to like here, too many wonderful poems to single out, but I have chosen “Nasreen’s Story” also from Part I to quote in full. It’s a masterful variation on the ghazal, the oldest poetic form still in use. It relies on a repeated word, which gives the form a hypnotic effect. The name imitates the sound of a dying wounded gazelle, and the form has roots in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, and Hebrew.
Bulging Blooms, a review of Telling You Everything by Cindy Hochman
To read Telling You Everything is to come away refreshed and revitalized from Hochman’s, original way of looking at the world and seeking her place in it. This is what poetry is, this is what it can be. It comes out of a life fully lived. In Brooklyn. Where Hochman continuously learns something new from an old situation.
A review of Waiting for Jonathan Koshy by Murzban Shroff
Jonathan Koshy is perpetually the outsider in this story of four friends who are awaiting Koshy’s return at the comfortable residence of Bollywood child Anwar Khan, whose home becomes a focal point for the four friends: Prashant, Dhruv, the narrator, and Jonathan. They come together there on the regular, aging disgracefully and gathering to reminisce over drinks and the odd joint, laughing, supporting one another, and allowing their voices to weave in and out like different parts of the same organism as they recall their youth.
Of Beauty and Terror in Berdeshevsky’s Kneel Said the Night by Margo Berdeshevsky
Here is a series of poems, stories, photographs, epigraphs that come together to create a world governed by a powerful and bold conjurer of images and tales that mirror the devastation and beauty and vastness of a journey in a world we will recognize as our own.
A review of Zen and the Art of Astroturf by Bronwyn Anne Rodden
In some of her poems Rodden asks questions that are profound and poignant. These are mainly questions about the absurdity sprouting in our world. I asked the poet if there was a thread in her poetry or a commonality and she answered: “Absurdism is something I think is relevant to people today, where we have been dealing with an international pandemic and environmental catastrophes, and people can relate more to the absurd than at many other times in history.”
A review of Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho trans. by Dan Beachy Quick
Dan Beachy-Quick translates as if he is beside Sappho on her footpath to something quite never before seen and heard. A grove of oaks shake with mountain winds in the book title fragment from a pastoral world of alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme. Our collective species memory enlivens, quakes to a time when we were one with the natural world, calling out holophrases to goats and dogs, other herders, and goddesses and gods.