Olivia Macassey
official website
Love in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
NZ$21.95,
Titus Books 2005
"These love poems are extremely beautiful with a solid intellectual
base. Love and courtship are important, but more weighty themes address
the elusiveness of being in a world where the virtual often provides a working
synecdoche for bodily experience. […] In rich and beautifully chosen
words, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction offers a disquieted
world of shadow, an intermediate state where reality is where you find it,
not where you might feel entitled to find it."
— Brenda Allen, Takahe (Issue 56, 2005)
"“Her poetry is deeply lyrical in a manner that’s not specifically
tied to the printed page and which belongs to the spoken word as much as
it does to its visual representation […] Best of all, though, is the
totality of the experience Macassey’s poetry offers – the complex
variety and subtlety of aesthetic flavours and the sensations it allows
readers to share with her.”
— Alistair Paterson,
Poetry NZ (Issue 29, 2004)"
"Mystery and response – love, in other words – are still
the core of my experience of the world, even with high materialism declaring
that there’s no inherent truth or meaning. How can we cope with this?
This poetry is useful; the voice treats itself with compassion, respects
its responsiveness, lets in the chaotic complexity of the world, refuses
a hierarchy of poetic value, and makes itself at home. This poetry details
movement within what to me is a familiar psychic world, a particular contemporary
subjectivity in which the self is the space between eclectic, vivid effects.
This poetry is very beautiful, even as it constructs a pattern out of all-too-familiar
and destabilizing worldly stimulants."
— Will Christie, Brief (issue 35, 2007)
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