There is a story that when the saxophonist John Coltrane remarked to his bandleader Miles Davis that he didn't know how to make his solos shorter, the trumpeter replied, 'Take the instrument out of your mouth'. Knowing ...

There is no need to choose between either "The Best Australian Poetry 2003" or "The Best Australian Poems 2003"; they are both essential. One can only hope that these series will flourish for many years. Some of the poems ...

Literary reputation, especially the posthumous kind, is a deliquescent thing. If it’s not going to melt away, then work is needed from friends and publishers, even critics. Forbes, while not exactly ignored in his lifetime, ...

It is a Pam Brown moment when, flicking through her "Dear Deliria", McCooey reads of 'historic butter sculptures' and hears at the same time David Bowie on the stereo singing 'yak-butter statues'. It's a Pam Brown moment ...

The ‘secret’ world of the blind person is one that this autobiography goes to considerable efforts to make real to the sighted person. In this respect, an autobiography of a blind person is almost a paradigm for autobiography ...

Alan Wearne's "The Lovemakers" is a book about overdoing it. Its characters have unwise love affairs, dream foolish dreams, drink too much, engage in criminal activity, amass (and lose) vast wealth, and talk incessantly ...

Aesthetic pleasure is immediately apparent in these new works from Salt, the Anglo-Australian publisher that has developed an exciting international poetry list ranging from Ron Silliman to Dennis Haskell. The pleasure of ...