normofthenorthfan1's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Minor: Racial slurs, Racism, Classism, Grief, Death, and Colonisation
archytas's review
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
Reading this is a little like eavesdropping on a conversation - while at times the poems stand relatively alone, most of the time to resonate off each other, discussing an interwined history. It is both very specific - much of the focus is on their shared place of childhood and the differing and not-so-differing perspectives on it - and a more general conversation about settlers and owners. It's a rich experience, sometimes wry, often laugh out loud funny, then sad and frequently angry. I have a bunch of quotes to use, but all feel like stripped of context they will also be stripped of meaning, so you'll have to read it for yourself.
kruu_dao's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
3.0
It is difficult to rate or review any work with multiple authors, and I think that it doubly so for poetry. There will inevitably be those poems that touch the soul, those that prompt a debate, those that open new windows, and those that don't quite manage any of the above. Those that are lost to you. And this collection was no different for me.
I will say that I struggled with the first few, to join the stream of their rhythm as a duo of poets. Or perhaps they were struggling to find their rhythm too, and my response mirrored that. Either way, I found that as the work progressed, I became more engrossed. The poems I most thoroughly enjoyed and rated most highly were the ones where the poets responded and reacted to each other. It mimicked a dance of thought and emotion, and it was a pity that this method was not utilised more often, to more effect.
I did also find that the most powerful of the poems were the ones I least expected, such as Yarn. A lot of them were about mining and the environment, and there was the risk of repetition (which many Yr 12 students who are studying this have also felt0, but there is a greater variety of theme here, and it was the non-mining ones that spoke to me the most. I cannot remember them all now, but intend to one day update this review when I reread and re-identify the ones I want to discuss.
The only other comment I can make is that it was not always apparent who the poet was. There was no clear alternating structure that helped you plan who it would be, and often the voices and subject matter were not distinct enough to easily differentiate without looking for the initials at the end. This increased my confusion and lessened the impact of the work when I was reading it - a simple change to put the initials at the start of the poem would have made a considerable difference. This could have been a stylistic choice of course, to highlight their similarity of thought and experience, but that didn't seem to be the point of the collaboration, and if it was, some explanation of that fact at the start would have been much appreciated.
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