Lynley Edmeades

'The woman is here to stay'

A review of 'A Doll for Throwing' by Mary Jo Bang

Lynley Edmeades
Photo of Mary Jo Bang (left) by Yuri Marder.

As she did in her 2004 collection, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Grove Press), Mary Jo Bang once again calls on her visual vocabulary — and background as a photographer — to portray various aspects of the Bauhaus, the short-lived German art school: its utopian vision, its Nazi-led shutdown in 1933, and its undeniable legacy. 

As she did in her 2004 collection, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Grove Press), Mary Jo Bang once again calls on her visual vocabulary — and background as a photographer — to portray various aspects of the Bauhaus, the short-lived German art school: its utopian vision, its Nazi-led shutdown in 1933, and its undeniable legacy.

A life lived in pause

Lynley Edmeades's 'As the Verb Tenses'

Anna Smaill
Photo of Lynley Edmeades (right) by Rory Mearns.

As the Verb Tenses is interested in varieties of distance — physical, temporal, emotional. As a collection, it seems not always certain whether to embrace or to overcome these distances.

As the Verb Tenses is interested in varieties of distance — physical, temporal, emotional. As a collection, it seems not always certain whether to embrace or to overcome these distances. There is insight to be gained in the cultivation of detachment, it suggests; but might there be something lost in moments of hesitation?

'Do it like this'

Lisa Robertson's '3 Summers'

Lynley Edmeades

In her 2012 book of prose essays, Nilling, Lisa Robertson cites Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind at length. Robertson says, “for Arendt, thinking resembles tracking, a kind of place ‘beaten by the activity of thought,’ which turns to ploddingly follow a course towards a pause.”[3] Robertson’s book also addresses the possibility of recess: “I want pause in vocation,” begins a passage from “On Physical Real Being and What Happens Next,” where the pause represents a space that deep thinking can take (43).

One must swim in language and sink, as though lost, in its noise, if a proof or a poem that is dense is to be born. — Michel Serres[1] 

I want pause in vocation. Venus
chatoyant in the formal dream
please tranquilize efficient Mars and his
efficient interests. Do it like this: — Lisa Robertson[2]

The grass never stops

Lynley Edmeades on Vana Manasiadis

Orchid Tierney and David Howard
Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis

Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.

Ballads, portraits, and tenses

Amy Stidham

Capsule reviews

J2 editorial assistant Amy Stidham weighs in on three new review titles: As the Verb Tenses by Lynley Edmeades, Power Ballads by Garrett Caples, and Lunch Portraits by Debora Kuan.

 

J2 editorial assistant Amy Stidham weighs in on three new poetry releases.

'Experimental' poetry — part one

'Experimental' poetry — part one

'Experimental' Poetry - part one

Vaughan Rapatahana
'Experimental' Poetry
'Experimental' Poetry

Kia ora ano.

Let’s take a spin and tumble into “experimental” poetry — more specifically within Aotearoa-New Zealand, but not necessarily resticted to that thin locale.

Syndicate content