Cynthia Sidney Hallam grew up in Lismore and now lives in the Blue Mountains. Her short stories poems and articles have appeared in magazines and anthologies and her poems have been performed on stage and read on ABC radio. She was recently awarded a Writing Fellowship Degree by the Fellowship of Australian Writers.
Writing these sestinas has brought to mind all the amazing lives that have touched mine and have made me realise just how precious every single strand has been. The sestina was invented by the twelfth-century mathematician Arnaud Daniel. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a set formula throughout the poem. I have found this form ......
'With freedom of movement and association seriously curtailed during lockdown Carmel Macdonald Grahame and Karen Throssell found instead an opportunity for liberty of mind - to recollect richly embroider and feel into other lives and vistas. This book showcases the agile creativity - dress-up boxes of the imagination - of these two eloquent ......
The story of Tristan is well known in the Western tradition of Romance. Few have not heard of Wagner's opera and the love elixir which Tristan and Iseut drink by accident. The story is already well established in the early medieval period where there are several competing manuscripts most of them incomplete for various reasons. John Watson ......
A number of the works in this collection centre on the notion of 'the journey'. In all instances it is ultimately an inner personal one psychic or spiritual in nature in accordance with whatever term best resonates with the reader. For the author the journey is a search for meaning a place of habitation and belonging of reflective respite ......
In "Return of the Heroes," Walt Whitman refers to the casualties of the American Civil War: "the dead to me mar not. . . . / they fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass. . . ." In her new poetry collection, Jude Nutter challenges Whitman's statement by exploring her own responses to war and conflict and, in a voice by turns ......
Driving into the Dark is a collection of poems published over the last five years. There are narrative poems and poems that respond to daily life and to world events. They reflect upon life's precious moments its vagaries its joys and the nature of love and loss.
'Borrowed Riches is an apt title for this fine collection of 100 short lyrics composed by an experienced and skilful poet. With her deft usage of the traditional Japanese tanka form Julie Thorndyke presents to the reader a range of thoroughly modern yet universal emotions expressed in poetry. The centrality of family human ......
"In this sequence of poems accomplished poet Richard Bell pays homage to his wife of many years who died of cancer. In doing so he explores the process of grieving finding it to be inseparable from memory and ultimately from love. Memories and feelings both have a kind of autonomy; they surface unpredictably according to their own ......
