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A Separate Creation by Brendan McMahon
ISBN 1 900397 67 6, 40pp. A5, £3.00. Flarestack Publishing, 41 Buckley’s Green, Alvechurch, Birmingham, B48 7NG, UK, E-mail , phone +44(0)1214452110.

Brendan McMahon’s poems were ‘written in the Illawarra, New South Wales’, and many, if not all, are clearly about or inspired by the region. He sometimes finds it hard to resist a second phrase or image, when the first has already done the work

Verandas are liminal, inhabit borderlines / of in and out, the home and the wild 
                                                                                  (Verandah)

The prevailing tone of these poems is a gentle sadness bordering on the elegiac

How many languages the sea has washed away! / Their remnants strew our beaches, / bleached as bone by history’s incoherence, / betrayed by the duplicity of days                              
                                                                                   (Gone)

Their form is uniformly loose, eschewing rhyme, the line and metre
irregular, though they are often quite rhythmic. The language is rich and emphatic. The effect of all this, however, is to make them read at times like strung together notes, and pretty gnomic ones at that.

Driven indoors by fear of the huntsman spider, / a three legged dog ate Julia Kristeva’s book. / Depression, she said, an attempt to find / a language for loss. But the speaker / the text itself’s devoured. 

                                                                                   (Gone)

This is not grammatical writing. Sometimes you can try too hard to be poetic. The dog has the right idea though.