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Paradoxes of knowledge and knowing, Nicholas Wright

page.stone.leaf
Dinah Hawken (drawings by John Edgar)
The Holloway Press
ISBN 9780986461880

Ruby Duby Du
Elizabeth Smither (Kathryn Madill illus)
The Cold Hub Press
ISBN 9780473268305

Gathering Evidence
Caoilinn Hughes
Victoria University Press
ISBN 9780864739261

On opening Dinah Hawken’s latest volume of poetry, one is struck by its materiality: for a volume of such spare poems, it is a heavy book, a beautiful thing. This sense of the material is evident also in the impressions made by the letterpress-printed words in the pulp of the cut pages. Nostalgia materialises, one might say, in the page’s imperfect absorption of the ink, suggestive of a saturated past all but lost except for its tracing in these spectral letter-figures that, ruin-like (or like the runes of John Edgar’s accompanying stone rubbings), evoke the fullness of the world and all its constituting otherness through their very imperfection.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

A lot to live up to, Caoilinn Hughes

When Our Jack Went to War  Sandy McKay Longacre, $20.00, ISBN 9781775533092 Brave Company David Hill Puffin, $20.00, ISBN 9780143307570 Speed Freak Fleur Beale Random House, $20.00, ISBN 9781775534709 When Our Jack Went to War is “a fictional story based

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Posted in Children, Literature, Review, Young adults

Poem – Caoilinn Hughes

The Transit of Venus They will lift their pencils and angle them like life drawers, sizing up Venus against Sól with abstract sums, stiff deductions. They may see the lead and sniff at how far we have arisen. They may

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Posted in Poem
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