Month: April 2026

Ed Southorn’s new collection ‘SEA LAKE MOUNTAIN’

Ed Southorn has published a new collection, available from Walleah Press for $20 (includes postage within Australia).

Ed Southorn’s second poetry collection examines memory, landscape, history and myth, weighing the impacts of property development, population pressure and climate change in the Bega Valley on the far south coast of New South Wales. The second half of the collection explores storied spaces and places in Europe, America and the Australian outback.

Artist David Campbell provided the cover for the book, while poets Liam Ferney and Kristen Lang contributed blurbs:

Sea Lake Mountain is steeped in the littoral, the pull and push of tides in the Bega Valley. ‘The wave is every living thing/gone before the Moon/can intervene.’ Even the Monaro plains are an ‘ocean [of] nothing but land’. Southorn’s keen eye and sharp descriptive flair let the poems wash in the numinous without neglecting to acknowledge the ‘library of toppled shelves’ the settler gaze must sort through. For ‘I am water and my blood salt’.

LIAM FERNEY

These poems diversify our understandings, breaking the linearity of our human stories in favour of an ecology of thought as fluid as the world entwining it. The poems follow yearning, conflict, sadness, love, but always through immersion. Ed Southorn finds his moment, the poems tell us, ‘in a confluence of synchronicities’. Meeting these moments, we leave with a larger world inside us.

KRISTEN LANG

cover 'SEA LAKE MOUNTAIN' by Ed Southorn
                                   Ed Southorn’s poetry collection ‘SEA LAKE MOUNTAIN’

Available for $20, posted within Australia, from Walleah Press

Poet JH Prynne dies aged 89

Poet Jeremy Halvard Prynne died last week.

Prynne’s reputation for poetic innovation and rigorous scholarship earned the respect of many including John Kinsella, (who came to know Prynne from his time at Cambridge University where Prynne lectured) and Rod Mengham. ‘J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century’, the pair wrote in their essay (‘An Introduction to the Poetry of J.H. Prynne by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella’).

In the ‘London Review of Books’ last week, Ian Patterson (poet, translator and academic and Life Fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge) wrote that:

‘Prynne’s poems have sometimes been dismissed by more mainstream cultural commentators as meaningless, absurdly difficult, unapproachable, pointless, elitist, or simply as nonsense or charlatanism. There is a long tradition of conservative lyric anecdotalism in English poetry, and in the way poetry is taught, that turns away from a poem that is not readily approachable. It’s true that poems like Prynne’s are difficult, in the way that a great deal of poetry is difficult if by that you mean it’s hard to approach at first reading. Poetry is an art that requires and rewards patient study, rereading, attending to paralinguistic features such as rhythm, rhyme, lineation, spacing on the page, and opening yourself to the poem, attending to the way it works on your feelings and in your body as well as on your mind, rather than just trying to manoeuvre what the poem ‘says’ into a plausible paraphrase.’

Further mention of Prynne’s poetry and career appears in ‘London Review of Books’  as well as at The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/23/extraordinary-and-original-poet-jh-prynne-dies, and at Bloodaxe Books, which notes that ‘JH Prynne was Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they were in the life work of J.H. Prynne.’

Recent reviews | Adès | Oxley | Fry | Southorn

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”.

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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.

Louise Oxley

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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.

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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.

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