The Japanese effect in contemporary Irish poetry [book review]

Review of: The Japanese effect in contemporary Irish poetry, by Irene de Angelis, Houndmills, Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 216 pp. ISBN 9780230248953.

Conclusion: Invisible aid: Islam, Muslim NGOs and development

This concluding chapter brings together the key themes and emphasises the key points raised by the contributing authors.

This voice: the poetry of knowing and not knowing

This essay is concerned with how poetry—reading it, writing it, and adapting it—relies on a dialectic between knowing and not knowing, a flickering movement between understanding and ignorance that is central to the production of poetry and its effects. To illustrate this, I discuss my poem, ‘This Voice’, and its subsequent adaptation into what I call a ‘poetry soundtrack’, a form of digital audio poetry employing poetry, music, and sound design. The essay illustrates the centrality of the knowing/not-knowing dialectic to poetry by considering the following with regard to my works: the thematics of nescience; the liminal and virtual space of interpretation and play (the latter as theorised by D.W. Winnicott); ‘nocturnal poetics’; and sampling (both sonic and lexical).

"Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Contemporary Australian Poetry"

This article considers the state of contemporary Australian poetry in light of colonial and late capitalist forces. It suggests that obscurity in innovative poetry is a mechanism that enables representation of the contemporary and activates new relational modes and activity among its readers. It considers how contemporary Australian poetry writes out of and transforms a toxic legacy, with particular focus on the absurd and disobedient humour.

Islam's Modern Day Ibn Battutas: Gülen teachers journeying towards the divine

There is a longstanding debate on whether Muslims can be modern. Some argue that they can only be so if they forsake their traditions and embrace rationalism. In this article I argue that the Gülen Movement, a transnational Turkish Muslim educational activist network has found a middle ground by blending religious traditions with modern day realities. Drawing on interviews from the movement's teachers and graduates of its schools, from Turkey, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, I explore, through the prism of al-riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm (travel in search of knowledge), their maintenance of the longstanding Islamic ritual of travel as a means of excelling both professionally and religiously. In turn, I demonstrate how the movement, on a number of levels, effectively reconciles the spiritual and the everyday through updating Islamic practices to better integrate themselves and other Muslims into a globalised world.

The third space: The poetry of Sudesh Mishra & the paintings of John Forrest

This book consists of two chapters that document and analyse the context and development of a collaboration between two writers, a poet and a painter, 33 poems and 33 paintings. The poems and paintings are placed in a dialogical relationship with each other. The book attempts to do more than present poetry and paintings serving merely as an illustration of each other. Instead the authors/artists have experimented with how each art-form can bring further significance to another and make new meaning. The two chapters and introduction set up for the viewer a means of exploring a novel form of making meaning. Furthermore these chapters discuss aesthetic, philosophical, historical and political questions endemic not only to the selected art and poetry but to questions governing creative art processes. In this sense it deals with what we have termed 'a third space'.