Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.

Every creature ever. Every single one was there./ Every animal that ever existed. Everyone / who ever existed. All life of the animal kingdom / but without hierarchies. A kingdomless kingdom.

A poetry of events also has to be generative — offer other possibilities, other ways of seeing. It is not enough to be settler-legacy anti-colonial and work in wish-fulfilling decolonising modes. There is a need to nuance levels of protest to be able to address injustices within injustice, and not hide behind binaries of right and wrong, good and bad.

A strong south-westerly cuts through the shutters and wakes me out of synch. Disorientated, I try to start a different story but have to secure the window. I am harried and haunted by the horrors of Du Pont. I cannot get away from them whispering at each node of modernity. Where will I arrive after this?

I’ve always had the aching feeling that—as a text to be shared among friends and maybe eventually ‘enemies’—the soul-body dialogue poem is a way of arguing towards spiritual certainty in the face of earthly corruption and doubt.

If he is right in saying the poets don’t like the work, Sakr works through the crisis. Non-Essential Work is essential as a mode of not only processing contradictions but working towards resolutions, and often using European forms (sonnet, sestina) to displace the colonial authority of form—and to hopefully liberate.

Malwatta is a skilled and motivated user of tone and tonality in expression, and he shifts between perpetrator and victim with a disturbing but powerful ease: we hear the racists in the hospital, we hear them at the barbecue, and we hear the racism coming from the mouths of white leaders and dissemblers.

Fogarty’s is a unique and essential poetic voice in ‘world’ poetry, that has determinedly pushed change in ‘Australian poetry’, and maybe most relevantly, has disrupted both English usage in Australia, and even taken this use well beyond hybridity into a full-blown reclaiming of the space of meaning of words that is anti-colonial, decolonising and, actually, revolutionary.

This book is overtly anti-racist and is all about conserving ecologies, and it acknowledges the colonialism of natural history, but it also is entirely inside what it critiques. It’s the most bizarre contradiction I've encountered in decades of critical writing, reviewing and activism.

The delivery zone is empty but investors have no crisis of relevance and couldn’t care less — deliveries are taking place elsewhere and will continue until the cows come home — there’s metal-dust on the water vats, the hand-sanitiser dispenser is exhausted or ignored.

No claim in the name ‘Jam Tree Gully’ — rather, a personal and familial association of presence which is neither assertion nor acquiescence. There are jam trees. There is a gully. No names displayed on gates.

I heard phrases I don’t recall having heard before when pied butcherbirds sang outside my sleep of a morning as indefinite article. Still troubled by the behaviours of a friend when we were catching reflections off a deep sacred lake

poem to the v-c and university as a whole: a ‘position paper’ for discussion 1. The killers who think they’re life-givers surround themselves with people who will praise them – there are dead trees to climb, crows’ nests to be made, drones to fly, rebuilding the unmaking in own images

Up on the hill, the moon is always large, but last night’s once in a hundred and fifty years

for MH And so … to rouse a whip, coral or corral or currach like coracle branded hide singed hair no modifier no not really to live by said decisive akubra mirage

I hear no birds at night through thick concrete and the lack is critical.

On land cleared to a few trees you say you’re protecting native wildlife (but not kangaroos,

The museum’s frog info site is sponsored by Alcoa, a company more responsible for the destruction of Hills frog habitat than any other. I went to confirm

God Without Borders: an address to the ‘owners’ of St Paul’s… St Paul’s, we will Not let words fail On your threshold, Nor world be sold Off to the rich Who will entrench In their towers Of selfish prayers. Witness the tents, See homelessness, Mark ‘industry’ In community! St Paul’s, we will Not let words […]

When Tracy and Tim arrive, I’ll go up and close the double gates behind them. At this time of evening it would be usual to see roos, but none show. Their numbers are down. People have been shooting illegally in the reserve, and earlier in the day I noticed a strand of fence-wire cut where a hunter has stepped over, chasing roos onto our place. Our property. I reject the notion of property. Custodianship sounds too appropriative, and for a non-Indigenous resident, all too convenient. Really, that’s the issue that burns below the surface of all I write about this place. Proudhon is only halfway there with ‘property is theft’. Some theft is more theft than others. He fails to investigate the nature of such theft: that’s more the key to understanding the implications of surveying, gifting, selling, claiming.

It’s been too hot during the day to survey

They’re full-blown in their early spring rush – pin cushions a fakir’s bed of nails so soft to tread on, so easy to make false

Replying to bad reviews is a fatal pastime. For those opposed to the tenor of the review, it gives credence to a reviewer who deserves none. For those who agree with the review, the defensiveness of the respondent confirms their opinion. I was not going to reply, but have since decided to do so because […]