REVIEWS & RECOMMENDATIONS
Letters To Mark (Regime Books) Review by William Yoeman from the West Australian Newspaper
“The mad either misconstrue reality or see it too clearly: to the fragile one is as fatal as the other; for the rest, well they’re just considered ‘normal’.
In Melbourne-based poet, Christopher Konrad’s Letters to Mark, anthropologist Adrian South wanders into the Tanami Desert in search of ‘Zarathustra’s Cave’.
His journey – physical and metaphorical – is unreliably ‘narrated’ only through the opaque agency of epistles, prose, diary entries, poems, quotations and suchlike. The result is a philosophic, poetic and religious tone poem that has more in common with Richard Strauss’ Thus spake Zarathustra than with the anodyne Pachelbel and Mascagni mentioned therein.”
Argot (Pomonal Publishing) launch speech by Shane McCauley in Rochford Street Review
“Fortunately, while packed with layers of meaning, sonorous wordplay, cultural allusions and moving imagery, Chris’ Argot is very much accessible. To be sure, as will be noted, there is much use of paradox, the endings of poems frequently presenting alternative and sometimes opposite possibilities.
Chris draws upon a huge range of multicultural references, reflecting his close and sharp awareness of such recent and monstrous catastrophes as the Second World War and the arrogance of racism, his enquiries into the nature of the self (he is an admirer or Pessoa and his extraordinary heteronyms) and what it means to be human, a fascination with the early origins of Christianity, the impact of central European thinkers and writers such as Kafka and Karl Kraus, the moral conundrums of Artificial Intelligence. And much more.
In short, the voices and worlds of Chris’ poetry will vastly reward those who cross the frontiers of his work.”
Review of Argot by Rose Van Son in Westerly Magazine
Dense with naming birds and nature, Christopher Konrad’s latest poetry collection, Argot, is as much an education as it is poetry.
In Feeding Grounds, (54) we learn of ‘sea birds · storm petrels, skuas, shearwaters.’ We immerse ourselves in imagery, sharp, consolidated. The words seem cut from the sea, ‘cut of viscosity /· akimbo and kilter of albatross / birthed from the Southern Ocean’ (54). This poem—wild like the ocean of which it speaks—takes us there, power driven and windswept: ‘The sea · an egress into tealshimmer / a wintry swell’ on which we feed; the title apt, immersed in colour, swell, winter.
The language both encapsulates and catapults, cuts to the core, the cold, the poignant end lines, ‘the brine from which we derive / and to which we will return’ (54)
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Blind Summits (Sunline Press) reviewed by Stuart Crowe in Westerly
This volume of poems will appeal to those who enjoy the challenges of prose poetry, in this case using a ‘call and response’ form. Blind Summits offers crafted derangements, in the Rimbaudian sense of sensory excess, to hyper expose the creative possibilities of open, and sometimes arbitrary, associations that still evoke powerfully.
Blind Summits offers eclectic scenarios that work like found fragments of hybrid worlds via migratory, refugee, enslaved, Indigenous, homeless and disembodied narratives; often strained with the residual effects of a brutal colonial history.
In past and contemporary settings of the outback, rural hinterlands and the suburbs, fate runs amok in personal and domestic struggles—in relationships breaking down or broken—sometimes softened with hope and the possibility of reconciliation and recovery.
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Review of The Soldier’s Wife (First Prize in the Todhunter Literary Award2012 & published in Westerly 58:1, 2013) Susan Midalia
The story is an absolute gem of compression. It succeeds in conveying complex meanings through relatively few words, and, like all good short stories, it suggests rather than states its meanings.
This suggestiveness is achieved partly through the use of metaphors to evoke the madness of war and the anguishing difficulty of recovering from its madness.
Symbolism is also used subtly and powerfully. As well, clever shifts in language – variously poetic, colloquial, military, vulgar, graphic – are used to suggest that the destruction of war almost exceeds language itself.