My mini-review of Cynthia Dearborn’s The Year My Family Unravelled.
The Year My Family Unravelled is a portrait of the author’s tender yet tumultuous Father/Daughter relationship told against the backdrop of the increasing anxiety of her father’s dementia, his adoration of freebies, his vast collection of ties from Vinnies and his deep, deep love of poetry. It’s not often a book brings me to tears, but this one … sheesh … this one disassembled me and put me back together again through writing and language that set my hair on fire. The Year My Family Unravelled, in all its anguish and terrible beauty is beyond magnificent. It is a love letter to a disappearing father and a daughter aching to be seen; it is an act of grace and a hymn to loss; it is a reminder that life is beautiful but it is also short. Hot diggity, this book should serve as a wake up call to us all.
MY LAUNCH SPEECH/REVIEW FOR CATHERINE THERESE’S BRILLIANT NOVEL, ‘THINGS SHE WOULD HAVE SAID HERSELF’ published by Hachette. Here’s my launch speech (which also doubles as a review). https://bit.ly/3An2wrW
MY LAUNCH SPEECH FOR LIQUID AMBER’S ANTHOLOGY LAUNCH
Here’s a link to the Launch Speech I wrote and delivered for the launch of Melbourne based publisher, LIQUID AMBER’S anthology, ‘POETRY OF ENCOUNTER’. Grateful to them for hosting the link to my speech in full on their website right here: https://bit.ly/3hCT5ib
Here is the foreword I wrote for Irish Poet Edward O’Dwyer’s Exquisite Prisons published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland
EDWARD O’DWYER’S EXQUISITE PRISONS
(or as I like to call it, ‘The Many Reasons You Should Consider Reading This Collection Immediately’.)
My friend Bronwyn once asked if I ever buy deliciously decadent food then pull over into a lay-by to devour it, as she says, ‘like an animal’. I won’t lie, the ‘like an animal’ bit makes me wonder what kind of a person she really is. I mean, she presents well, is articulate, well educated and yet …
Fast forward to Edward O’Dwyer’s Exquisite Prisons landing in my inbox and, finding I could not resist its lure, pulled into the first available lay-by and devoured it like aforementioned, ahem, animal.
And the poems were beyond delicious. They were brilliant, heartbreaking, nourishing, tender, wise, poignant, hilarious, philosophical––and WILD. As I read, I marvelled at how Edward O’Dwyer’s poetic mind works, how one idea flows so seamlessly into another, how he clasps the reader’s hand and leads them through a poetic landscape and straight to the core of a heart that’s swinging upon its hinges.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back in 2017 when I was about to send my first poetry manuscript out to publishers, my google search led me to Salmon Poetry. I loved the sound of their philosophy and their director, Jessie Lendennie, who’s Advice On Writing tab was full of such honest, caring and generous advice that I decided to buy not one, but two collections from the site. The first title that jumped out and grabbed me by the metaphorical balls was Edward O’Dwyer’s, Bad News, Good News, Bad News. It proved to be a brilliant collection and I devoured it (like an animal?) in one sitting. Here was poetry I wanted to read, and read, and read again. Here was a poet who’s voice was honest, unpretentious, wise, deeply moving and very fucking funny. And so it is with Exquisite Prisons. Here, once again, O’Dwyer has taken all of the essential ingredients required to make these great poetry soufflés that melt in the mouth and leave you desperate for more. Here, once again, he has added and mixed and stirred––not a pinch too much, nor an ounce too little––to produce lines that catapult you straight to the emotional epicentre of each poem as though you’ve just been fired from a great cannon.
Certainly some of his subject matter might be perceived as risky–– after all, who writes about their wife going to the toilet during the night, and wondering if she ever fantasises about crashing the ceramic lid down on her sleeping husband’s head? Who writes poems on the public’s sickening fixation on finding their own viral moment, even if it involves the death of a child? Who, in fact, scoops up his blood-soaked child / and begins waving its inanimate hand / in gratitude towards the audience? Edward O’Dwyer, that’s who. ‘Art is dangerous’,so says Duke Ellington, ‘It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.’I for one absolutely want this kind of art: this Edward O’Dwyer kind of art that’s best served hot with a side of danger, huge ladles of risk and lashings of humanity, all madly whisked into peaks of love, longing, heartbreak and hilarity. Exquisite Prisons, this Mount Everest of poetry goodness, provides all of this in spades.
In the poem, Knocking On Her Door, the poet spends time imagining how things might be / might have been:
On and off, and for eight or so years / I have been thinking about it / of knocking on her door once more …
Sometimes, I imagine, she answers …
Sometimes, I imagine, the door is red, / not green anymore …
Who amongst us has not imagined knocking on the door of an ex-lover [or insert your own quiet fantasy here], imagined them opening it and falling in love all over again as though it were for the very first time? In O’Dwyer’s poetic world, however, sometimes it’s not her, but her new lover who opens the door, which is, Awkward, because you must love him now. And if that line doesn’t grab the beating heart out of your chest and strangle it till it dies, then I don’t know what will.
In Exquisite Prisons you will meet the wife who disappears with a colourful clown and leaves the husband asking himself, have you ever before felt so colourless / in your sensible, well-to-do clothing … ? You will meet the poet and their childhood rival, both now in their nineties in the same end of life ward, his rival still able to make his visitors laugh and is, dying / better than you possibly could. And you will meet the woman who orders a new bum online all the way from a laboratory in Paris––the same woman who rolled down the window one day / and threw her tits out / into the ditch and who left her nose on some train tracks, / suitable punishment for being too big.
I’ve had the great honour of eating scones with Edward and also reading with him in his hometown of Limerick. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest to see and feel the audience hang on the perfect lilt of his every word, clutch their hearts at all the right bits and laugh out loud while discretely dabbing the salty business away from the corners of their eyes. Edward is a lyrical poet and a gifted story teller who tells his heart slant and we are the better for its telling. He is cheeky and provocative and his poems––fresh, original and deliciously left of centre––pin you to the wall of your truth and pat you down, before wrapping you in a blanket by a roaring log fire where you sit nursing a glass of Côtes du Rhône in the silent devastation of your heart quietly crushing.
If I were to try to sum up how this collection makes me feel (which I guess is what I’m trying to do here), I’d say Exquisite Prisons is the poetic equivalent of listening to all the best Radiohead songs on repeat till you are primed and ready to prostrate yourself at the alter of love and life and madness and humanity––because the pleasure and the pain of it all is just too damned irresistible.
In a world where no happy trees were harmed / in this book’s making and where Leonard Cohen is still dead, thank God for the strange fruit of these poems. And thank God for Edward O’Dwyer.
THE WOOLLAHRA DIGITAL AWARD FOR POETRY AWARD 2022
It was an honour to judge the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry 2022. I selected Caroline Reid’s, ‘A Poem To My Mother She Will Never Read’ Here’s what I had to say about the poem:
Caroline Reid may (or may not) be a shouty person. But let it be said, this poem screams off the screen and demands (in the most beautiful and heart-achingly urgent of ways) to be read. This is a wild, grief-fuelled ride through the landscape of two coexisting worlds (the world of dementia and the ‘other’ world); a poem where the poet straddles what feels like the unbridgeable distance where those closest to us are furthest away; where a daughter mistypes google searches and looks to algorithms for answers where there are none; where the poet, wet with crazy in my good daughter devotion keeps searching and trying to get a handle on something that has no handle. This poem, in all its heartbreaking, jaw dropping glory jumps from one idea to the next like an adult playing leapfrog in a swing park where they don’t want to play anymore. It is original and fresh and devastating in all its terrible beauty.
And look at how it looks on the page––how it brilliantly it sketches the erratic pathways of the poet’s mum’s deteriorating memory; how it meanders so messily, yet so beautifully. Look at how it seems to mirror dementia’s fucked up-ness, the sharp turns, the short / sometimes long lines, how it mimics the wildly oscillating grief of this daughter frantically watching on while her mother slips from her like a series of black and white photographs disappearing down the back of the couch and she has literally no way to save her.
And yet the poem itself is not erratic. It is wild, yet masterfully controlled. It sings and it jars and is terrifying and haunting and every line triple-summersaults through the air and lands so precisely that if this were the poetry olympics, each line would score a perfect ten from each of the judges.
And then there are lines like these––dazzling in their honesty, vulnerability and originality and squeeze your heart till it’s turned inside out:
–– Please, eat all the flowers I bring / And wear your handbag on your head
–– The sometimes loveliness of sitting in silence with you
–– I long for you like I long for a place that never was
and I am tired of being
curious
Then these lines which so tenderly expose the tragicomedy of it all:
They say dementia has no rule of thumb, which is lucky / because / I love seeing things recontextualised.
Like the last time you drove drunk on the freeway in the bus / lane / Then asked the nice policewoman for a copy of your / mugshot / to give to your grandson at Christmas.
As I read, I too hated the grey vinyl furniture, the Quiet ripe air and by the end of the poem I have secured my hand luggage in the over head compartment of this extraordinary poem where grief is aeroplane white with too many empty seats and I don’t want this poetic journey to end.
Click here to read the poem: https://mslexia.co.uk/competitions/meet-the-winners/a-poem/
MY THOUGHTS ON GEMMA WHITE’S ‘OH MY RAPTURE’
Oh My Rapture is a poetically immersive experience; a cool, edgy ride; an intimate collection done different; a rich journey through TWO hearts that makes poetry feel THREE dimensional. Reading each poem alongside the corresponding Red Hand Letter is like holding a tumbler to your ear and pressing it against your neighbour’s wall. These poems contain secrets. They are made for reading under the doona with a flashlight. They are deliciously voyeuristic.
MY REVIEW OF DARBY HUDSON’S POETRY COLLECTION, ‘FALLING UPWARDS’
(Published by 5Islands Press, 2019)
When a poem, (‘Sausage’ p36) casually suggests I focus all the energy from a particular thought into the uncooked sausage I’m holding, my ears prick up. I sense good poetry in the air, in the same way a fat Labrador detects deliciously sizzling bacon in a far off kitchen. In preparation I sit up, tie a napkin around my neck, lift my cutlery in preparation and get ready to dive in.
‘Falling Upwards’ kicks off with the breathtakingly original, ‘100 Points of ID to Prove I Don’t Exist’ (p11), each line of the not-the-kind-of-ID-we-might-expect is given a weighting:
‘Syncing my watch to the distant sound of a barking dog (18 points)’
‘Shazaming the wind in the trees (4 points)’
‘Calling my name into a crowd and seeing if anyone responds (150 points)’
‘Eating a peanut butter sandwich in the shower and not telling anyone (25 points)’
It’s not every day I read anything so original. Each line of this poem enters me like a small precious breath and when I exhale I am changed by the experience. The lines are tenderly profound and beautiful in their simplicity. The kind of lines that make me wonder why I haven’t written lines like these myself. In the peanut butter sandwich line, the ‘not telling anyone’ reveals the honesty of the human who wrote this poem, their acceptance of their ‘dark’ secrets, their lack of inhibition in laying themselves bare on the page and I know I am reading something authentic, something honest, something that comes unfiltered from the heart of the poet who wrote it directly into mine. When I read this poem I feel as though I can fly.
The poems in this collection find their way in through broken doors that can’t be fixed, cross busy roads while wearing headphones; they observe the ‘brick-fingered, square hands of a tradesman’, sit at office desks five days a week and list ‘lovely, useless things’ the poet’s mum told him and in a world of fake news and post-truthery, this poet sources his own brand of news in places of the most unexpected beauty:
‘A cloud’s shadow pressing across an
ironing board lying on the nature strip. (p30)
A baby’s pacifier lying silently next to
an empty beer bottle in the gutter.’ (p30)
These exquisite lines don’t just urge me, they scream at me to pay more attention to my own world––to look out for the ironing boards that are no doubt littering the nature strip of my own life. These lines remind me I need to lift my head more.
As I read, ‘How to Catch a Fish’ (p55), my partner, on hearing my gasps and seeing me clutch my chest asks what’s wrong. ‘I’m reading a poem called, ‘How to Catch a Fish’’, I reply, knowing that this will mean nothing, unless I quote all of the heart crushing stanza:
‘A child draws a picture of a
fish, which is then corrected by a
teacher
and suddenly the
world is lost.’
In ‘Culture’ (p29) the poet tells us he has reached the edge of this world and is ‘standing in the middle of an expansive, godless rubbish dump of culture’ and I nod in recognition and I too hear the sound of ‘seagulls circling above it all’ while ‘strangers race to what they call their ‘next scheduled appointment’’. And as the poet leans over ‘the crumbling edges’ of himself, I too am on the precipice of a place inside myself I can’t quite explain but it feels something like freedom.
‘Falling Upwards’ is glorious. It is a clay cup thrown by an experienced potter. The kind of clay cup that feels as though you’re holding the earth in your hands; the kind of clay cup that reminds you the world is not perfect, but it is yours to make of it what you will. The kind of clay cup you drink from and it fills you with a longing and a melancholy you didn’t even know you had.
I could go on because this collection is my new favourite thing, but I’ll leave you here with the collection’s final two lines in all their terrible beauty:
‘sleep is a velvet gunshot to the head
a star splattered sky.’
Two unforgettable lines, to add to the too-numerous-to-count unforgettable lines in this collection.
MY REVIEW OF FERGUS HOGAN’S POETRY COLLECTION, ‘BITTERN CRY’
MY REVIEW OF DAVID STAVANGER’S POETRY COLLECTION, ‘CASE NOTES’
MY REVIEW OF LEONIE CHARLTON’S MEMOIR, ‘MARRAM’