David Ades, ‘The Toolmaker and Other Poems, reviewed by Martin Duwell (‘Australian Poetry Review’, April 2026)
A slim volume, The Toolmaker and Other Poems seems, on the surface, a deliberate corrective to A Blink of Time’s Eye. It’s a set of portraits, all in a similar fifteen-line format, in which the personality of the poet doesn’t enter in any obvious way. The first poem is about a toolmaker and his knowledge that one day his tools might fail him, knowledge that enables him to have a more balanced and humane approach to the work itself. This is obviously pregnant with allegorical possibilities about the poet’s own vocation. On the book’s cover, however, the author explains how, having written the first as a way of suggesting that his own career as a lawyer leads others to an inadequate sense of what his self is really about, other poems in the same mode “insisted on being written”.
Louise Oxley, ‘Range Light’, reviewed by Martin Duwell, (‘Australian Poetry Review’, March 2026)
There are seventeen years between Buoyancy, Louise Oxley’s second book, and this new one. There were five years between her first book, Compound Eye – little larger than a chapbook, really – and Buoyancy. Barely over a hundred poems in more than twenty years must make Louise Oxley the most restrained of Australia’s better poets. This new book, while a little thinner than Buoyancy, has poems of as high a standard and has a lot of connections with that earlier book.
Kathryn Fry, ‘To Speak of Grasses’, reviewed by Stephanie Greene, (‘StylusLit’, March 2026)
The lasting impression of Kathryn Fry’s latest poetry collection, To Speak of Grasses, rests in its evocation of wonder. These poems explore the living world, through nature, art, music and family, attending, most of all, to awareness of being. In the titular poem ‘To Speak of Grasses’ – which appears in the first section of the book – the poet travels through the Pilbara, observing both continuity and impermanence as ‘home-spun hummock grasses grow the land’, which she finds ancient in form, rich in wildlife. ‘It‘s hard to process the time taken’, she writes, ‘to gouge shapes to foster life’ (8-9). In this poem, as in many others, there are subtle references to brutality and sadness.
Ed Southern, ‘Pareidolia’ reviewed by Jane Frank (‘StylusLit’, March 2026)
In the blurb I provided for this striking first full collection of poetry, I noted the poet’s ‘wide ranging and sensory appreciation of history, mythology, art, land and coast,’ as well as his unrelenting interrogation of fundamental human questions in ways that surprise the reader and draw us in. These are also poems that pay close attention to public events and frame them expertly— at times, a kind of documentary poetics— in keeping with Southorn’s career background as a newspaper reporter of 32 years in Australia and the United Kingdom.