Uche Nduka’s newest collection of poetry, Pirouette, from Lithic Press, is a visual masterpiece even before the book is opened. The cover and shape of this printed volume are an artful introduction to what is inside. I want to first talk about the structure of the book. There is no table of contents. The poems have no titles. Pirouette is 198 pages of poetry that, like a pirouette, spin with the force of a tornado, while simultaneously presenting themselves as the most elegant act that a body can make.
Category: Poetry Reviews
A review of Blue Physics by Mary Lou Buschi
Mary Lou Buschi is the real thing, and we are convinced as early as the epigraph, “Blue”. Buschi is a master of the poetic line. Each line has its own integrity, and it must be so. Buschi works with emotional subject matter that refuses sentimentality. Her work is invested in the precision of this emotionality better kept distanced from the speaker. She achieves remarkable authority of voice and tension through her chiseled craft and detailed attention to language.
A review of Joss: A History by Grace Yee
These are public documents, but combined in ways that create an intimacy, especially when followed by a visceral and personal piece like “white hills”. This poem follows the lists of names, taking the reader directly into the cemetery with its lonely unadorned graves. The sonic elements of anaphora and alliteration repeated throughout the poem create a sense of footfall, as if we too were walking around Bendigo’s White Hills Cemetary, looking at the mounds.
Undulations: A review of Reflections of a Woman’s Life by Gypsie-Ami Offenbacher-Ferris
And to be is to be filled with wonder, an emotion that is threaded throughout this book. “The Arrival” is about the wonder of a mother giving birth to her child. While it is spoken in third person, the poem is so visceral it seems as if told from the newborn’s point of view. “Clutching at the foreign, warm five/ fingered hands, sucking, plucking,/ poking at skin rampaged by the/ stinging air surrounding her.” The wonder of nature pervades “My Garden.” In the garden death, in the form of a dead dragonfly, coexists with life, a snake and a toad.
A review of And Wales by Accident by Linda Lerner
Metaphor, irony, and paradox abide in all five sections of this book. The ball in the opening poem of the first section, “And just like that,” becomes more than a ball “red hot as it flew overhead, each time / gathering speed covered / a greater distance,” literally in the park, figurative in the poet’s emotional landscape.
A review of The Green Room by Cath Kenneally
The book is very much centred on water: its criticality to human and other forms of life, and the ways in which we are intimately connected by water to all living things. Though The Green Room is relatively short it covers a lot of ground, with thirty short poems that are powerfully condensed. Keneally utilises the gaps or silences between words and stanzas, often separating lines with double, triple or quadruple spaces. The poems flow like water, leaving plenty of room to pause and reflect between words.
A review of Field of Vision by Stephanie Horvath
With a one-word title, a poem becomes a political statement, a thermometer of the zeitgeist. But Horvath refuses to settle down. Her North Star drives a quest for understanding. She is wondering about meaning and purpose, particularly when answers aren’t obvious. How do we know when it’s good? How do we know it’s enough? Where does the poem end?
A review of The Unnumbered Anniversaries by Kurt Olsson
Reading Kurt Olsson’s The Unnumbered Anniversaries is like believing that you’re walking a route you’ve taken since childhood, then waking up, that same landscape outside the bedroom window. It’s hard to separate the dream from the real. And it becomes true that the dream and the real are inseparable, maybe the same.
A review of Women In Marigold by Mansi Dahal
With the subject and object of Dahal’s poems fluctuating so often, it’s impressive how consistently she remains grounded in them. Her preference for plain assertions carries the firmness of an Oriana Fallaci interview, oratory with bite. Just as the line breaking into “me manipulative. A woman” summarizes the exhaustion of this poem, summarizing single images abound in others.
A review of Rupture Anthem by Hera Naguib
The poems in Rupture Anthem chronicle one woman’s quest for personal independence in the face of so many obstacles. The daughter of Pakistani foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, she experiences both sexual repression from strict patriarchal Islamic clerics, in educational settings, and the exploitation of migrant workers that her family endures.