Brendan Doyle

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/ali-alizadehs-ashes-and-brendan-doy...

I read somewhere recently that a common difficulty with first books of poetry is that they lack thematic or structural coherence. In this book, structure seems to have been deliberately avoided: it would have been easy enough to group these poems into, say, commentary on current affairs, travel poems, nonsense poems, nature poems and family matters, but there seems to have been a deliberate decision not to do so. For what it’s worth, I think it was a good decision: it has given us a book where each poem stands alone, responding to its own occasion, whether it be a political commentator’s callousness, the bitter-sweetness of a child-access arrangement, or ash from a bushfire falling on Sydney Harbour. The result is a subliminal democratising suggestion that readers could make poetry from their own occasions.… (meer)