Posts

Reviewing Books

14 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog5 Comments

Angela Meyer I thought, for this post, that I would share some of my own personal mantras/guidelines for reviewing books. I’ve been reviewing books for about 4.5 years. That means, really, I’m still pretty new at it. I started out with LiteraryMinded and mini-reviews in Bookseller+Publisher magazine. I have now reviewed for a range of publications, including Australian Book Review, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, Bookslut, Cordite, Mascara and the Australian. After reading this you might also understand why I called the thoughts in my previous Southerly post ‘non-reviews’ as opposed to reviews. They were more off-hand, less structured…

Recently read: non-reviews of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, Flying with Paper Wings, The Cook

9 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

Angela Meyer The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll, UQP (Aus), 9780702238468, July 2011 (paperback) This book has been near the top of my pile since July and I finally picked it up to start reading on a flight to Sydney recently. I am an animal lover but have barely read any books on animals! What seduced me about this book was the pictures and descriptions of the resident chimps of Fauna Sanctuary in the middle of the book, ie. under the picture of Binky: ‘Binky may look tough, but he’s actually a very sensitive and loving chimpanzee as well as…

Tempeh matters: the launch of Janet De Neefe’s Bali: The Food of My Island Home

5 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Angela Meyer Recently I attended the launch of Janet De Neefe’s new cookbook Bali: The Food of My Island Home. De Neefe moved to Bali 26 years ago after falling in love with the place and with a local man. She has founded two restaurants in Ubud: Casa Luna and Indus. She also founded the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which I have attended twice: once as an audience member, once as a guest of the festival. Her large and lavish launch brought a bit of the Ubud Writers and Readers Fest to Melbourne. We sampled tempeh, arancini balls, beef…

December 14th – Last Day for Southerly Christmas Subscriptions

3 December 2011 SoutherlyNews2 Comments

A year’s subscription comprises of three issues of Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary magazine. Full of thought-provoking essays, fabulous stories and sublime poetry, it showcases the best and brightest of Australia’s established and emerging literati. Do you know someone wonderful, intelligent, literary, magnificent, witty and dearly loved? A subscription to Southerly is the perfect gift to give them this Christmas. BUT: Due to university closing times, Southerly must receive your Christmas subscriptions no later than December 14th. Please download a subscription form here: http://southerlylitmag.com.au//subscriptions/ and either email with your credit card details, or post with a cheque or money order made out to…

Last 2011 monthly blogger – Angela Meyer!

1 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Thank you, Andrew Burke, for your excellent posts. Please don’t forget to check out his blog: http://hispirits.blogspot.com/ For our final monthly blogger for 2011, we have the ever-fabulous Angela Meyer of Literary Minded! Her bio is below: Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer. Her stories and criticism have been published widely, including in The Lifted Brow, Wet Ink, Seizure, Cordite, AntiTHESIS, Bookslut, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian. For Southerly, she once interviewed author Cate Kennedy. She is a former acting editor of Bookseller+Publisher – the Australian book industry magazine – and runs a popular blog…

Collaboration – Best with a Little Stir

28 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Andrew Burke Recently I posted here about Collaborative poetry, citing examples by renga poets, a ‘mock’ poet, and an award-winning Canadian poet, Phil Hall, and myself. As usual, I stepped in blindly, and started writing before I had done the research. This is the creative side of me: I’m just an excitable boy, as some pop song said years ago. When I was a university lecturer, I warned students off relying on Wikipedia for their research. It was early days for the online encyclopaedia; many of the entries were biased and incomplete. I still believe Wiki has to be used…

Collaboration

21 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Andrew Burke hey cuckoo– are you scolding the loafer? – Issa, 1813 Friend and fellow poet, Canadian Phil Hall, has just won the prestigious Governor General’s Poetry Award for 2011. His winning book was Killdeer, published by Bookthug. You can read more here.I’ve been procrastinating for days about writing this. I have no idea why, but events have caught up with me and now is the time. Being only human, I tend to pay more attention to the books and poems of the poets I know personally, so I’ve been reading and, frankly, puzzling over a lot of Phil’s work…

Flight Log – Poetry with Wings

12 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Andrew Burke Boarding cards were the ultimate bookmarks – you were issued one before you left and when you woke somewhere between here and Frankfurt they reminded you at bleary breakfast that Fiona had just been cornered in a grimy basement and you were winging now over Romania and would be free in two hours. From an unpublished poem Vanishing Species by Andrew Taylor. This poem is a wonderful example of a new breed of poem which has grown up since the Wright Brothers took to the air. When people say there is nothing new for poetry to say –…

Day One

8 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog4 Comments

Andrew Burke Today, I read a sign which said, ‘When you write your life story, don’t let anybody else’s hand on the pen’. Now, that feels so right to me when I apply it to poetry – but then … there’s a multi-handed force directing my hands called ‘influence’. We all have them, no matter how we try to ditch them along the way. Even Tranter with his tricky manoeuvres – they’re learnt from Oulipo and his influence from Ashbery is well documented. Or the poets who murmur Sylvia Plath poems to their pillows and write their shadow texts at…

Blog on blog love

6 November 2011 SoutherlyNews

You will have noticed at the right hand side of our front page links to Australian literary journals and magazines. One of these is Overland, who is currently having a subscriberthon. In the interests of promoting Australian writing, Australian literary journals, and simple blog-on-blog love, we encourage you all to go over to the Overland blog and subscribe. If you subscribe this week, you can win prizes as well! And while you’re at it, why not subscribe to Southerly too? Our tab is just at the top. Go on, you know you want to…

Long Paddock for Southerly 71.3: A Nest of Bunyips

3 November 201130 October 2022 SoutherlyLong Paddock

Southerly 71.3 is available to purchase here. This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. POETRY Rae Desmond Jones, Ash Wednesday Stuart Barnes, Cocoon Andrew Burke, “The birds are still in flight . . . ” Liam Byrne, soviet kitsch Peter Dawncy, ruins Michael Farrell, Telephone Liam Ferney, NC-17 Ian Gibbins, Dr Korsakoff and Colleagues Report Philip Hammial, Dear Sisters and Brothers D.J. Huppatz, Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels Greg McLaren, The rusting land . . . , from Broken Ng Mei-kwan, Rainstorm (trans. Bonnie S. McDougall)…

Next Monthly Blogger – Andrew Burke!

28 October 2011 SoutherlyNews

Ali Cobby Eckerman has provided us with a month of thought-provoking posts and fabulous poetry. Next up is Andrew Burke. His bio is below: Andrew Burke is an Australian writer with publications going back to the 1960s. He has published mainly as a poet, but has also had small plays on the boards, tiny films on the screen and short stories sprinkled over the years. After one career as a Creative Director in advertising, he went into academe in mid-age. He fancies being a ringmaster in a circus next. His most recent collections Beyond City Limits (Edith Cowan University, 2009), Blue Rose (novel,http://etextpress.com/books.htm)…

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