Magazines

I've got two more magazines through recently - the latest Orbis which has a review by me in it of Mathew Sweeney's Sanctuary, and Agenda, which has a large selection of new Australian poetry in it. I'll confess to having a bit of a fondness for Australian verse - I have John Kinsella's Landbridge anthology (Arc) and it's full of really interesting poems. This one looks good too - with Alison Croggan, John Tranter and Emma Lew, and loads of others, it has to be. There's a spirit of adventure in their poetry which I sometimes find lacking over here.

I guess that spirit of adventure is here too, but it's harder to find. I mean, I quite like Orbis; it has a nice friendly spirit about it; but I often find myself not terrifically excited by the poetry. It's often well-enough written, but... It also has American poets in it, and at least one Australian, so I should be satisfied.

It could be over-familiarity. Maybe I read so much non-English poetry because I want something stranger than most English poetry magazines provide. Maybe I need to read so widely in order to keep myself interested, especially as now when I'm not writing so much. Ah well. I do look forward to reading both magazines; it'll be interesting to compare and contrast.