John Kinsella

Across the many modes of David McCooey’s fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Falling, there is one compelling voice that easily fuses irony and lament: the voice of “the poet”. I don’t necessarily mean McCooey himself, but rather …

Iggy Pop’s new album, Every Loser, is one of the great albums of its type – and its type is Iggy Pop.

“It’s not the ghost of the poet or his sad wife in the tower by the rushing water that we are looking for: sensation, awareness, presence. No, that’s circumstantial. It’s a bird, a rare bird we are hoping to spot to rewrite the truth …”

The Chats’ album Get Fucked emerges from a particularly Australian history of self-mocking political punk.

In his 14th collection, Harvest Lingo, Murri poet Lionel Fogarty continues his decades-long commitment to disrupting colonial language, colonial thought and their machineries of oppression. Fogarty creates poems in which language is liberated, …

“My great-grandmother interpreted as she played, or played from a score in the flickering light. How would she have run with this? Single mother, migrant, royalist, leftover Huguenot.  That lusty ethereal necromancer priest, the general stuffed into …”

This is an essential gathering and representative selection from the vast body of Judith Wright’s nonfiction. It is well organised into thematic sections, with each essay, article and extract from longer work introduced precisely and briefly. Georgina …

I have spent decades tussling with the poetry of Les Murray, just as I did in my friendly but contending and disputing personal interactions with him. This book of “last poems”, based on “three-quarter’s of a book’s worth” of poems respectfully …

“Between freeway and shopping precinct / Widowmakers throw limbs onto car roofs / And windscreens while a flock of a dozen / White-tailed black cockatoos counterpoint / The squalls coming from the north / Before setting off parallel to a thousand cars …”

“The house won’t stand without foundations of trust / and the town won’t work if people guard only their own. / The insomnia that racks your life is a strange greed of wakefulness / so difficult to shake in the lateness where body eats dark and light …”

“I am a dressmaker who does alterations to make a living. You might call me a tailor, but what would you know? How long would you spend down here in the heat, working 12-hour shifts? And this is better than when I worked in the shop with 30 others doing …”