Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Keri Glastonbury, Giramondo Publishing, $24.00.
Newcastle Sonnets is a collection of 14-line poems that engage with the transformation of Newcastle, now acclaimed as one of the top hipster cities of the world.
Fascinated by the pride felt by the locals, Keri captures her own views about the city. It’s an oddly, intensely uncertain relationship. Glastonbury, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle, is an accomplished poet and author whose writing often brings to mind a sense of dislocation in the surroundings she inhabits.
Newcastle was once considered a masculine working-class heartland. In the sequence of sonnets that compose her homage, Glastonbury celebrates the city’s peculiarities and inconsistencies, remixing the pertinent effects of post-industrial reaffirm with the lingo of social media.
Not poetry in the traditional sense, this book is an explicit, some may say a distinctive view of one person’s life and dealings and emotions about Newcastle.
As Glastonbury explains: “Newcastle Sonnets is in part an antipodean, regional, post-internet, post-industrial queering of Ted Berrigan’ 1964 New York-based collection The Sonnets. In a similar way to Berrigan’s sonnets, my poems are ‘sonnets’ only in so much as they are fourteen lines long, and they do not follow any particular rhyme scheme or pentameter (relying heavily on sampling from social media).”
“The sonnets are intrinsically local and autobiographical act while simultaneously constructing a profoundly distributed self out of our increasingly networked lives. They could also be considered as a form of literary architecture, at once a poetic gentrification of the city while clawing back agency from the dominant forces of urban renewal (such as property development and privatisation).”
“My sonnets were roughly composed over the last five years, a period during which Newcastle has undergone a significant shift in terms of its cultural approbation in the national imaginary, and in many ways the city is now a far cry from the yobbo car culture on Hunter Street parodied in Bob Hudson The Newcastle Song in 1975. I moved from Sydney to Newcastle over a decade ago now, after growing up in regional NSW, and perhaps writing these sonnets is the closest I’ll come to being a bearded Novocastrian barista.”
