- Free Article: No
- Contents Category: Journal
- Review Article: Yes
- Article Title: Blast, no. 7
- Online Only: No
- Custom Highlight Text:
Blast reinvented itself as a poetry-centric magazine in March 2005, and is now something akin to the Chicago-based Poetry – a lot of poetry, followed by critical writing about poetry – though Blast is shorter and Australian. Like Poetry, it is an upper-echelon affair, born from a philosophy of quality. The problem with the new Blast, for better or for worse, is that many of the same names keep coming up. Kevin Brophy, Jan Owen, Michael Sharkey and Leon Trainor have featured in four out of seven editions. Elizabeth Campbell, Bruce Dawe, Mike Ladd, Paul Magee, John Jenkins, Philip Salom, Petra White appear in three out of seven. The problem, you ask? They are all good poets!
- Book 1 Title: Blast
- Book 1 Subtitle: no. 7
- Book 1 Biblio: $10 pb, 56 pp
This edition starts with three poems by Peter Steele. ‘Mending Gloves at Anglesea’ is a sombre but sanguine meditation on time and travel. It begins ‘Uphill from Demon’s Bluff and the long blue haul / to pack-ice’, but roams in the mind to North America, ‘that zone where anything goes that goes’, and then into history for examples of attire synonymous with identity, like ‘the jewelled bordered, macing flash / On the hilt of England’s sword / When Elizabeth came to town’ – the adornments that have ‘bodied us out’. The poem humbly returns to the repaired leather gloves, that ‘will proclaim / The amateur status of the wearer, / Ferric and stoney by name’.
Petra White’s ‘Spring’ also concerns fashion, but from the cynical perspective of Cosmopolitan-style advertisements that associate new clothes with happiness: ‘When gazing upon seas rich in dolphins, make a white / shirt pop with statement bangles.’
There are many insightful and stimulating poems, and a few quirky ones. For example, Thomas Shapcott’s ‘The Rat’ is a take on personal heritage that sees a rat as ‘an ancestor’ for moving the family in the Black Plague of 1347.
Blast 7 is an engaging and polished anthology.
Comments powered by CComment