"The Grasscutters": Australian Poetry Review
Just out in “Australian Poetry Review” is a detailed and insightful review of Jo Gardiner’s “The Grasscutters” (5Islands Press, 2026). Reviewer Martin Duwell begins by contrasting the predominance of “poems of imaginative projection into exotic other lives”, which was “one of the hallmarks” of Gardiner’s first book, “The Impossible Shore” (Vagabond Press, 2024), with the more local and personal terrain over which the poet ranges in “The Grasscutters”, in which most of the poems “are anchored in the poet’s experience of her environment”. and “focus intensely and forensically on how living actually takes place.” The result is a “fine book about life as it is lived, where it is lived."
Despite the difference in their domains, there is much that the two books share:
There’s a precision and grace about the poems that makes them memorable and enough conceptual sophistication and variety so that you never feel they are monotonously mining the same territory. But I think the interesting issue ... has more to do with Gardiner’s own poetic facility. To summarise briefly, my impression is of a poet whose natural tendency is to expand her material. This happens because of what, in the old days of rhetorical studies, would be called “fertility of invention”.
Characteristically, Duwell’s interest is not limited to what Gardiner does in her book; he is at least as interested in how she does it. His close analysis of her poetic technique honours Gardiner’s craft as well her content. If you are interested in the “how” of poetry as well as the “what”, this review is one you must read.
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Our gratitude to Martin Duwell and other reviewers who keep the conversation about poetry alive.
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