Love poems and not-love poems: fierce and gentle, passionate and bitter, pushing at the boundaries of minimalist language, Michelene Wandor's latest poetry collection from Arc certainly packs an emotional punch despite the brevity of many of the poems and the economies of space on the page. As the poet urges us: ‘Read and feel.’
“Technically, there’s nothing startlingly modernistic about Michelene Wandor’s poetry – it’s the whole focus of attention which places it alongside an older achievement in Anglophone poetry from Eliot and Pound to Thomas and Graham and those who have survived the so-called ‘revival’ in the 1960s. These poets were not willing to accept the singular view of human experience… there is a restless searching extension towards greater boundaries, a multiplication of significance at any point… allowing units of meaning to ‘float’ off towards glimpsed affinities.. In Wandor’s poetry, these units of meaning stand alone, contributing to the continuing address but separable and retained as things of worth in themselves.” Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review