{"id":3448,"date":"2026-04-18T21:33:50","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T21:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/?p=3448"},"modified":"2026-04-18T21:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T21:57:08","slug":"some-recent-reviews-david-ades-louise-oxley-kathryn-fry-ed-southorn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/2026\/04\/18\/some-recent-reviews-david-ades-louise-oxley-kathryn-fry-ed-southorn\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent reviews | Ad\u00e8s | Oxley | Fry | Southorn"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Ades, \u2018The Toolmaker and Other Poems, reviewed by Martin Duwell (\u2018Australian Poetry Review\u2019, April 2026<\/a>)<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

A slim volume, <\/span><\/span><\/span>The Toolmaker and Other Poems<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em> <\/span><\/span><\/b>seems, on the surface, a deliberate corrective to <\/span><\/span><\/span>A Blink of Time\u2019s Eye<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>. It\u2019s a set of portraits, all in a similar fifteen-line format, in which the personality of the poet doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s own vocation. On the book\u2019s 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 \u201cinsisted on being written\u201d.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Louise Oxley, \u2018Range Light\u2019, reviewed by Martin Duwell, (\u2018Australian Poetry Review\u2019, March 2026<\/a>)<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

There are seventeen years between Buoyancy<\/i><\/em>, Louise Oxley\u2019s second book, and this new one. There were five years between her first book, Compound Eye<\/i><\/em> \u2013 <\/b>little larger than a chapbook, really \u2013 and Buoyancy<\/i><\/em>. Barely over a hundred poems in more than twenty years must make Louise Oxley the most restrained of Australia\u2019s better poets. This new book, while a little thinner than Buoyancy<\/i><\/em>, has poems of as high a standard and has a lot of connections with that earlier book.<\/p>\n

Louise Oxley<\/a><\/p>\n

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Kathryn Fry, \u2018To Speak of Grasses\u2019, reviewed by Stephanie Greene, (\u2018StylusLit\u2019, March 2026<\/a>)<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The lasting impression of Kathryn Fry\u2019s latest poetry collection, <\/span><\/span><\/span>To Speak of Grasses<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>, 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 \u2018To Speak of Grasses\u2019 \u2013 which appears in the first section of the book \u2013 the poet travels through the Pilbara, observing both continuity and impermanence as \u2018home-spun hummock grasses grow the land\u2019, which she finds ancient in form, rich in wildlife. \u2018It\u2018s hard to process the time taken\u2019, she writes, \u2018to gouge shapes   to foster life\u2019 (8-9). In this poem, as in many others, there are subtle references to brutality and sadness.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Ed Southern, \u2018Pareidolia\u2019 reviewed by Jane Frank (\u2018StylusLit\u2019, March 2026<\/a>)<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In the blurb I provided for this striking first full collection of poetry, I noted the poet\u2019s \u2018wide ranging and sensory appreciation of history, mythology, art, land and coast,\u2019 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\u2014 at times, a kind of documentary poetics\u2014 in keeping with Southorn\u2019s career background as a newspaper reporter of 32 years in Australia and the United Kingdom.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Purchase<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Ades, \u2018The Toolmaker and Other Poems, reviewed by Martin Duwell (\u2018Australian Poetry Review\u2019, April 2026) A slim volume, The Toolmaker and Other Poems seems, on the surface, a deliberate corrective to A …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[198,390,392,388,391,335,389],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ades-david","category-duwell-martin","category-frank-jane","category-fry-kathryn","category-greene-stephanie","category-oxley-louise","category-southorn-ed","entry entry-center"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3448"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3455,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3448\/revisions\/3455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}