Reviews & Interviews
Reviews for One River - Puncher & Wattmann 2023
Excerpts from Magdalena Ball’s review
Quotes from One River in italics
“Steve Armstrong’s latest collection, One River, has a zen quality, full of contemplation and observation. The work is centred around the Hunter River Estuary in Newcastle, NSW, where Armstrong walks regularly, and the writing follows the gentle rambling of the river catchment and the rhythm of human perambulation – walking purely for the pleasure of it rather than to get somewhere. Haibun is the perfect form for these reflections, combining prose and poetry to create a work that is both descriptive/educational and deeply intimate.”
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“The prose is no less rich than the poetry, though the prose has a kind of innate motion to it distinctive to Armstrong’s work and indicative of his subject matter, while the poetry effects moments of stillness. The work moves through the different aspects of the Hunter River: Ash Island, the Upper Chichester, the Upper Allyn, and the Williams, some of which are repeated in different times, so that the sounds, scents, light and the company are always unique, the time of day shifting, the animals that move through the landscape, the weather or the scent never the same, creating a sense of sacredness:
At the end of the race, the stream’s rushing dilates in a still sparkling, almond-eyed pool. There’s a vigour with which the river is quiet here, a trace of the ineffable which draws me into the nested shade of trees arching out from the bank.
Frogs croak low down like hinges
on a crooked door. A fantail takes
it higher, while the river’s
lyric is of nothing if not
contentedness. A pair
of wood ducks rifle by on purpose.” (from Rivers of the Mind)
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“It is love of the natural world that charges One River with such tenderness. One River is not a long book, and it is so tightly crafted, with such deep intelligence that it is very easy and relatively quick to read. The book’s setting is indeed one river, but in this microcosm, there is a sense that this one river is all rivers, and that any moment of contemplation contains a distillation of all moments. It is difficult not to be changed by such a work:
Like the psilocybin in magic mushrooms, which takes full effect without warning, all of what’s manifest here insists upon itself as a single organism, and in the space between each velvety trunk and the next is a portal on stillness. For a short time, I know myself as a being with roots, in the thrall of the collectedness of mind that forests are.” (from Dreaming Above Carrowbrook)
Go to Maggie’s wonderful website compulsivereader.com to read her review of One River in full.
Reviews For What’s Left - Flying Islands Press 2020
Excerpts from Dimitra Harvey’s launch speech
“In a way, the title of the collection is a question of loss, as much as it’s concerned with what remains. We live at a strange juncture in the history of our species — an era characterised by loss, and loss of our own making. More than at any other time, the dominant nations of the planet live in ways which are absurdly disconnected from the wider, more-than-human world.”
“It’s important to note that while the collection considers loss and grief deeply, the answers and alternatives it offers are firmly rooted in wonderment of the natural world.
The more-than-human realm is reprieve from grief and heart’s ease, as in the poem This Morning, where the cries of black cockatoos are ‘hinge for a heart — whose sentence is long’, and allow the speaker to ‘wing with the birds, / …dwell in the hills a while.’
The flowers, in Meeting with the Morning Walking, declare ‘Behold our colours, they’re more beautiful / than you can bear…’ and the speaker, unable to resist them, falls ‘through the eye of a bloom’. Nature's beauty and mystery is a wellspring of joy, spiritual sustenance, connection, and belonging.”
“For me, Steve’s poetry attends to what Burnside describes as ‘a new science of belonging’ — one that, in his words, puts us 'back in the open’, seeks ‘to make us both vulnerable and wondrous again — to reconnect us’ with the earth. What’s Left is charged with that ecological imperative to dwell in and with the rest of the world in a new way.”
Click on title for access to the full launch speech.
Note: Dimitra is referencing John Burnside’s The Science of Belonging: Poetry as Ecology from Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, (ed.) Robert Crawford, 2006, Oxford University Press.
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Reviews for Broken Ground - University of Western Australia Press 2018
An excerpt from Cassandra Atherton’s review in Plumwood Mountain
In ‘One Thing That Matters’, the sense of becoming is thrilling as the prose leaps from ‘the crunch of white river pebbles under the car’ to ‘a drop of water, a full and glistening curve hanging perfectly at the tip of a frangipani leaf’. Scattered through the narrative are more ominous and humorous moments, including the lines ‘something is dying, and dying hard’ and ‘A reliable erection is a fantasy’. The poem ends with the haunting image of the boy ‘scooping up as many fish as he can hold in his arms’ and his desire to know them and, by extension, himself:
A boy of twelve running down a beach in California, where perfect slender bodies cover the sand. It’s not the naked beach goers of Bolinas who take his breath away—iridescent, fresh from the cold Humboldt current—it’s fish. A bay brimming with anchovies; a super-shoal migrating south. They don’t fight as they founder; it’s terrible to watch and at once irresistible. The boy runs the length of the darkened sand, and scoops up as many fish as he can hold in his arms. He wants to do something in recognition of their impossible number; and to know their still flashing and silvered beauty. Or maybe he’ll just bite off their heads.
Excerpts from Geoff Page's review of Broken Ground in The Australian (March 2-3, 2019),—
“... love of nature, as it is rather than as it’s romanticised, and an openness to its metaphysical implications. Even the long, in-stepping lines of his descriptions of it are reminiscent of Tredinnick and Gray—and, before that, the American poet William Carlos Williams.”
“A considerable number of Armstrong’s poems are, in effect, bushwalk diaries and interestingly raise, implicitly or explicitly, what the non-Indigenous bushwalker might know, or discover, compared to Indigenous people living in the same area. A couple of characteristic moments in this regard occur in “Bandilngan (Windjana Gorge)”. “Bare feet / buried in the silt / of the riverbank—all the selves I bring fall quiet. Play in the silken / dirt, dance in clouds / of dust and slanting light.”
“Armstrong’s work so far would seem to be part of a notable tradition in Australian poetry, going back at least to Roland Robinson (1912-1992)…”
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From Ivy Ireland's review of Broken Ground in Cordite Poetry Review—
“Steve Armstrong’s Broken Ground is an extended walking meditation cleverly disguised as a book of poetry. Inside this collection resides a determined drive towards immersion and a deliberate movement beyond text, into a numinous, continuous cadence: a secret rhythm of stride known only to those who would seek to map out earth and sky.”
For the full review: http://cordite.org.au/reviews/ireland-armstrong/1/
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Click here to listen to an interview with Magdalena Ball (compulsivereader.com) and hear a selection of poems from Broken Ground.
Click here to read Magdalena’s review of Broken Ground at compulsivereader.com