There’s a strange sort of surety that a lot of folks in countries like Australia and the United States carry from birth. It begins with the words: ‘that would never happen here.’ It’s couched in the sense that only a really flawed society would descend into the types of totalitarian regimes that plague nations in the Middle East. Last night, my cousin Shirin in North Carolina told me America is reminding her more and more each day of Iran. ‘And, I don’t mean in the good way,’ she said.

The following is a list of my ten favourite moments in Australian poetry in the past year or so. I call it a list of moments because not all of these are poems; a few of them are discussions of poetry which I enjoyed for various reasons. In a recent entry on my own blog […]

Ghazal Games Roger Sedarat Ohio University Press Experimenting with traditional poetic form is not a new concept. John Keats wrote his poem ‘On the Sonnet’ warning of the dangers of constraining the ‘muse’ to strict form. Imagist poets like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell adapted the haiku form to English-language verse. Where there are rules, […]

Anger and frustration shades many of the poems in Ali Alizadeh’s new collection published by UQP. If you learned about social injustice and cultural displacement by emigrating from Tehran to the Gold Coast as a teenager, you too would probably be angry and frustrated at your observations of racism, religious and cultural hypocrisy, and conservatism […]

Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (eds) Puncher & Wattman Poetry I’ve put off reviewing this book. During the whole of 2010 I must have reviewed one too many collection of academic lyricism which clashed violently with my academic burnout. The result was that every contemporary […]

The Bee Hut Dorothy Porter Black Inc. Whatever you think of her poetic style, Dorothy Porter was the contemporary godmother of narrative poetry in Australia. Having read and watched the Joanne Davis performance of The Monkey’s Mask, and having also thoroughly enjoyed What A Piece Of Work, I learned some important lessons about how to […]

The Best Australian Poetry Alan Wearne (Ed.) UQP Some months ago I wrote a brief critical review of Black Inc.’s Best Australian poems. Remember – the post that was met with a surprising amount of confusion, discussion etc? Well I left writing this follow-up review of the rival The Best Australian Poetry 2009, edited by […]

Reading The Best Australian Poems 2009 has proven to be a challenge for this shunned poet. Not only for my belief that somebody in this country needs to initiate a Best Un-Australian Poems annual collection, but also because at least 60 of the 108 poems are about rain, or the sea, or other large bodies […]

A question for the poets: What do you do when you’re at a party, and some unimaginative guest asks you what you “do”, and you have that moment where the following thoughts collide in a mangle of mild discomfort in your mind: 1. Do I bypass the details of how I have a menial day-job […]

Does anybody else get literary hangover? You know, when you finish a major piece of writing and you get sick/exhaustion/brainlessness/depressed immediately after for a period of about two weeks? When I was a playwright, I’d unvaryingly get struck down with tonsillitis the day after every closing night. I just finished writing the last chapter of […]

Cordite Poetry Review‘s Epic edition is now online. The issue’s guest editor, Ali Alizadeh, writes of his interest in the epic poem being met with rejection and ridicule on a poetry forum, and the form is self-consciously referred to as archaic. I’m here to tell you that epic/narrative poetry is far from past its expiry […]

If you’re paying $120 per session, the last thing you want to hear from a shrink is “Oh well, you’ll probably always be a bit disturbed”. Some days I’m almost sure I’ve morphed into Stevie Smith, the subject of my Ph.D. thesis. Some days I think I would even consider performance poetry if I could […]

Welcome to my first blog for Overland. This poet will not be posting poetry here. I’ll let you know if I post something half worth looking at on my own page: taramokhtari.wordpress.com, if you seek toilet reading material (I know you all take your iPhones to the loo with you for Tweeting purposes these days). […]