Andy Jackson

When the Animals Speak   Whose version of you is this? Whose lips? Which way is up? Which way is awake? Before your brain had the capacity to form memory, they had told you all they needed to, so that later, when it was repeated, …

In ancient Rome, a tintinnabulum was a wind chime placed outside a house or shop to ward off evil. The word is most often associated, however, with Arvo Pärt’s self-described compositional style, drawing on the minimalism in religious chants. Judith …

The compulsion to make lists is not purely of diagnostic interest to psychologists or the domain of scientists and accountants but also a potent and complex poetic mode. Song in the Grass, Kate Fagan’s first collection of poems in more than …

L.K. Holt’s sixth collection of poetry, Three Books, opens with Merry War (of never meeting and never ending), Holt’s liberal translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun and of the first-century BCE Roman poet Catullus, …

It’s no wonder Greek myths keep being modernised, when the times feel so consequential, riven with myriad disruptions caused by hubris and violation. Ekhō is the latest such retelling, a book-length poem in three sections by writer and artist …

Π.O.’s two most recent books were epic in scope and heft. Fitzroy: The Biography was a sprawling history of the Melbourne suburb; Heide, a kaleidoscopic account of art-making and patronage. Both books wielded dizzying accumulations …

Two works to “sing a song of exhaustion” and to lament this country’s “lust for smoke”.

It’s likely you have already encountered Richard Tipping’s visual poetry, perhaps without even knowing his name. At the height of Queensland’s 2011 floods, his 2000 public artwork Watermark fulfilled its own consciously prophetic anxieties. …

In the late 1980s, American nuclear-armed warships visit Perth, prompting impassioned protest from a wide array of people, including the narrator of John Kinsella’s verse novel Cellnight. After a brief prologue, they recall what they have seen …

These days the line between dystopian and realist narratives feels increasingly blurred. The virtual world too now seems inseparable from the physical. The Exclusion Zone amply demonstrates that poetry is able to speak to these convergences. Shastra …

The title of Lucy Dougan’s latest poetry collection quotes the surrealist artist Paul Nash, for whom the“monster field” is that “elusive and ubiquitous” place glimpsed in passing, which makes a profound impression but which cannot be easily …

Since her debut novel in 1999, Heather Rose has written astutely about the vulnerabilities of people and the sublime beauty of the natural world, particularly her home state of Tasmania. Her Stella Prize-winning The Museum of Modern Love used …

Peggy Frew’s fourth novel begins within a mysterious, willed stasis. Nina, 37 and living by herself, has begun “not caring”. She eats mostly leftover scraps of food at the cafeteria at the hospital where she works. She begins wearing only the ill-fitting …

The climate crisis is nerve-racking. How can we possibly hold – in our bodies, relationships and politics – the loss of what might count as a conceivable future, the prospect of unrelenting waves of disaster, the disappearance of so many ecological …

I confess I expected the title story in this collection of Beth Spencer’s writing to be concerned with half-truths in private or public life. Near the end of the story, though, I read “in the 70s Fibs bras were all the rage, made in crazy bright new …

It’s a familiar distinction. While guilt is the feeling of having done wrong, shame is the feeling of being wrong, the sense of being defined by some fatal, irredeemable flaw. Understanding shame is one thing, escaping from it something …

The narrator of Cold Enough for Snow is visiting Japan with her mother. “We did not live in the same city anymore, and had never really been away together as adults,” she writes, “but I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons …

Bewilderment begins with Theo and his son Robin, at a cabin in the forest, wondering about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Theo is an astrobiologist developing computer models of possible worlds that will help determine …

There are complex, fundamental questions around how we relate to non-human animals. How can we find a way to organise our systems so they are not exploitative or degrading and are not poisoning the land and water we all depend on? What might a genuinely …

“The shape of sound” is not just a metaphor. Sound is literally shapely. It’s physical, forceful; it can be overwhelming. Fiona Murphy’s debut memoir reminds us that while the “prevailing assumption is that deaf people hear nothing ... I feel …

“At five, the doors click shut. Security / walks a final circuit and clocks off. The eyes / of the prominent are lost in the middle distance / beyond office, sports field or studio. Hair and skin / of oil, watercolour, polymer, the reassurance / of names …”