Category: BOOK REVIEW

LUXEMBOURG by Stephen Oliver Greywacke Press, Canberra 2018 112pp., $24.95 Reviewed by Nicholas Reid hough I’ve never met Stephen Oliver in person, I’ve been reviewing his poetry for nearly twenty years and ought, in the interests of transparency, to acknowledge that I have played a role in the publication of his latest volume. It’s a significant work which should have found a home with a major press, and thereby hangs a tale for Otago University Press expressed an interest and would have published it were it not for equal measures of stubbornness from both poet and would-be editor. It’s a shame that that deal fell through. It’s a shame, more broadly, that the work of a major poet like Oliver, writing at the height of his powers, could find no other major press. But it is also pleasing to find the volume named in The Listener as one of the best ten poetry books published in 2018. [1] For the collection displays Oliver’s gifts with a more than usual intensity, the gift for writing well-formed short lyrics (and prose poems) with a complete mastery of voice and tone, along with a gift for imagism rarely to be found. Consider, [...]

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