HEAT Poetry Online is the poetry review website of HEAT Magazine, supported by the Australia Council for the Arts. It aims to address the shortage of outlets for critical review and discussion of Australian poetry collections, by providing a space for discussion removed from the commercial restraints of mainstream media. HEAT Poetry Online is committed to the support of new voices in literary criticism, and to fostering a creative and critical community for contemporary poetry.
The imaginary and the actual distance between the west and east coast of this huge country throws up interesting anthologies. A couple of years ago, on the east coast there was Harbour City Poems, a selection from two centuries of poems set in Sydney. Now Fremantle Press is publishing new poetry by Western Australian poets. [...]
Trying to keep up with the Ben Frater of 6 am in the Universe is a difficult thing. As soon as he lets you see where you are in any one of his poems, he picks at the words he used to mark your bearings, masticates them into nonsensical gibberish, and spits them back in [...]
Caroline Caddy’s ninth collection of poetry, Burning Bright, brings together acutely observant poems that often centre on an experience; each experience holds the speaker’s intense attention and is turned this way and that until all its angles are illuminated. The poems focus on image and, in something of an homage to this focus, a number [...]
Gig Ryan has been a considerable force in Australian poetry since the early 1980s. In its taxonomy, however, it is hard to know where to place her. Clearly she shares something of the dry wit and verbal ingenuity of her good friend, the late John Forbes. Her knowledge of, and ironic attitude towards, popular culture [...]
2011 has been something of a boom year for Ali Alizadeh. To start things off, his nonfiction work, Iran: my grandfather (Transit Lounge, 2010), was shortlisted for a category in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Following hot on the heels of Iran, Ashes in the Air was published earlier this year and looks set to [...]
Part One: Tara Mokhtari An Absence of Saints is a collection of lyric poems based on poet Rosanna Licari’s family history, childhood and travels. Divided into three parts, Licari’s collection firstly retells stories passed down from relatives from Europe during World War II, then touches on memories of a childhood as the daughter of migrants [...]
It would no longer be hyperbolic or wishful to say that, against all apparent odds, Australian poetry has survived and flourished over the last two decades. During the mid-late 1990s, as epitomised by Penguin Books Australia’s dramatic decision to terminate their poetry list, the future of Australian poetry looked rather grim; yet a number of [...]
Peter Porter was a dear friend of mine for some thirty-six years. He had grown into being a wonderful two-hemisphere poet, great talker, rolling wit, and yet all the time he might have quoted that poem which opens, ‘It is the little stone of unhappiness/ which I keep with me. I had it as a [...]
It can be difficult for a poet to exercise in public. What’s fun and, indeed, challenging for the poet is not necessarily an enjoyable ride for a reader or listener. The feat of Jordie Albiston’s The sonnet according to ‘m’ is that it invites us not just to observe but also to enjoy a writer [...]
Storm and Honey, Judith Beveridge’s fourth book of poems, is in some ways a recapitulation of many elements of the work that it follows on from. This, though, is too consistently powerful, vivid, various and viscerally persuasive a book to be seen simply as a consolidation. If some poems in the book revisit and reconsider [...]