Shari Kocher
Shari Kocher

Foxstruck and Other Collisions

Published 2021

Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize Highly Commended 2022 in the NSW Premier’s Literature Awards

Erudite, sage, and deeply indebted to tradition, Kocher hones her imagery to a fierce precision, such that the poems transcend beauty and become something uttered otherhow, both spellbinding and life affirming at once. Kocher writes the domestic microcosm with a dark and reeling lucidity, and when she turns her notice to the natural world, which is ever present in her work, a profound environmental consciousness opens the porous body somatically, as a dance. This is dazzling poetry. 

— JOAN FLEMING

 

Cordite Poetry Review by Eva Birch: http://cordite.org.au/reviews/birch-kocher/

‘If there’s one thing Kocher does in this book it’s affirm existence, precisely by tarrying with the violence that is one of its conditions. Kocher starts the titular poem ‘Foxstruck,’ standing in the paddock, looking at the “Dog Star,” Syrius—the brightest star (19). This Syrius has “the almost / forgotten name of a flagship,” the HMS Syrius of the first fleet (19). This ship brings with it “typhoid, cholera, and sweetened damper,” the latter a euphemism for the poisoned bread settlers distributed to First Nations people in an act of genocide, as Kocher writes in the notes (135). The speaker has inherited this history: “Makes no sense how we got here” (19).’

Landfall Review by Dr. Loveday Why: https://landfallreview.com/i-hear-you-i-hear-you/

‘The language in Foxstruck ranges from lyrical to staccato, dreamlike to the accurately anatomical, oratorical to the quietly intimate and vulnerable. It’s also often lush, as if the poet is savouring the resonance of words on the tongue. I found myself pausing and reading aloud lines, not just to hear the beauty of the poetry but to feel what the words did to my body. For these are songs with actions and movement as much as they are the written word pinned to the page. It is the oscillation between the concreteness of words and their meaning and their dissolution through poetic journeying that gives Foxstruck its sense of yearning and its sense of otherworldliness.’

Poetry Shelf Review By Paula Green:

“Shari’s poems resemble brocade (full of sheen and intricacy), the rustling texture of silk, hard-wearing everyday denim and the coolness of cotton against skin. Glorious! There are weaves and tucks and fasteners and stitching. I am thinking of the loom behind the line, the handwork and the handiwork, and never forgetting the heartwork. I am thinking of threads and buttons and agile sewing needles. Because this poetry is rich in craft and artistry. The visual matters as much as the aural. Motifs glint. Story is intricate thread.”

Reviewed by Paula Green

 

About the cover:

New Moon to New Moon, September 37°20'33.4"S 175°30'30.5"E , Contact Print.

By Kate van der Drift.   From a series of camera-less photographs called Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes.  A durational accretion, these images are made by burying large format sheet film in the liminal zone of the Piako river between the ebb and flow of the low and high tides. Pollution and nutrients from intensive agriculture mix with organic matter and microorganisms, producing clouds of vivid alchemical reactions. The sensitive photographic surface is colonised by Piako’s unique mix of elements, algae and bacteria.

 

Live Readings:

  • Poetry Shelf audio: Shari Kocher reads from Foxstruck and Other Collisions
    July 2021 via NZ Poetry Shelf

  • Day 2 of the #PeetMeNotLeave invitation - with a shout out to Dominique Hecq etal. - and Loveday Rose Why - beaming to you from the Birrarung river on Wurrendjeri country... 3 November 2020 via facebook

  • Day 3 of #PeetMeNotLeave poetry blitz, with thanks to Dominique Hecq, Kit Kelen and others for the invite. I nominate Anne Elvey next & thank her for her years of dedication at Plumwood Mountain Journal. 4 November 2020 via facebook

  • Day 4 #PeetMeNotLeave, with thanks to all the grandmothers. I hand today’s baton to Susan Fealy, whose exquisite and delicately wrought Flute of Milk (UWAP) I highly recommend... Susan, will you do us the honour? 5 November 2020 via facebook

  • Day 5 of #PeetMeNotLeave, 6 Nov 2020, (8 days, 8 poems, 8 invites) - a somewhat ludic offering today ... poem ‘Ode to Sludge’ from the fifth section of Foxstruck and Other Collisions (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020), ‘Copper’, with thanks to Dominique Hecq & Kit Kelen & others for the invite ... I pass the baton to Claire Gaskin, and the marvel of her work that screels from low to high and renders the surrealism of the real renewed...6 November 2020 via facebook

  • Day 7 of #PeetMeNotLeave poetry blitz (8 poems, 8 days, 8 invites - with selected work collected in an anthology titled The Russian Almanac, intention: flood the world with poetic energy!).
    Here is an extract from a long form poem, ‘Forty Desert Days and Nights in White’, which was Runner-Up in the Newcastle Poetry Prize and published in their anthology The Crows in Town; now to be found at the heart of Foxstruck and Other Collisions (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020).
    I’d like to invite Penny Drysdale, poet, lawyer and editor extraordinaire, currently based in the Northern Territory, who might be able to share some of the poems from the recently curated collection, Arelhekenhe Angkentye Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia. And maybe some also some of her own from Dew and Broken Glass? What do you reckon, Penny Drysdale? 9 November 2020 via facebook

  • Final offering for the #PeetMeNotLeave collective: ‘Foxstruck’, first published in Australian Poetry Journal (Ed. Michael Sharkey) and Best Australian Poems 2016 (Ed.Sarah Holland-Batt). I’d like to invite the illustrious Helen Lehndorf to carry the torch on flooding the world with poetry... i thank Dominique Hecq and Kit Kelen for the invitation as I now bid adieu to this platform... marvelling at what is flooding in. 12 November 2020 via facebook

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The Non-Sequitur of Snow

Published 2015

Highly Commended in the 2015 Anne Elder Award: “[…] a beautifully crafted and coherent collection that almost floats in its imaginative universe.”

“The Non-Sequitur of Snow reads as coherent and freshly made even though the poems have been written over a twenty year period. The major concerns of this first collection are the relationship between the self and intimate others, and process, including the process of apprehension itself. The poems evoke heightened moments. Some are at tipping points of extremity: integration and disintegration, safety and violence, change and limits to change. Poems disorientate the reader with synaesthesia and dream narratives. The poem is a place for reflection, often after fracture or challenge, and a crucible for change or transcendence.” SUSAN FEALY, Plumwood Mountain Journal

“There is an airy sense of activity throughout this volume. Kocher’s poetic settings range freely between the material and the imagined, forging connections across generations, yet coming through with surprising steel in some pieces. Structurally the collection is diverse, flowing, and occasionally more experimental…The Non-Sequitur of Snow is a successful combination of lightness and sharp attention to problematic details. The structural shifts of the poems complement the constantly evolving familial relationships detailed within, while bodies are broken down to be better understood. Kocher’s stylistic approach is at once immediate and accessible, yet sharply layered with deeper investigative purposes.” SIOBHAN HODGE, Cordite Poetry Review

“Written with Adrienne Rich and Rumi as apparent guides, Shari Kocher’s The Non-Sequit­ur of Snow… is very different again from the preceding­ three. Her poems for the most part are of a rare modesty and lightness. The two-page poem Strawberries, for example, narrates a story of a marriage proposal in a strawberry field — that the narrator’s lover doesn’t remember taking place — without becoming icky or indulgent. Clay presents a mother, son and grandmother together making clay angels for a nativity table. The grandmother “hasn’t visited in years”; a comment that creates a separation between the two women.” MICHAEL FARRELL, The Australian

“The twenty-six poems that make The Non-Sequitur of Snow reveal Kocher’s interesting background of having lived and written in many places over the last two decades. A diverse richness of experience is clearly evident in this debut collection which spans dreams, observations, memory and moment…Kocher’s work sustains precision but also embodies a quiet yet deep sensuality.” MONICA CARROLL, TEXT

 

Praise for this book:

“Shari Kocher writes poetry of incandescent power. In this stunning first collection, free verse is both stylised and fired by incantatory rhythms as much as by the poet’s eye for crystalline image-making. Sweep away the snow and one arrives without preamble at the stoop of myth and memory.”
— A. Frances Johnson
“This is a beautifully accomplished book, full of genuine poetry. The poetry is full of light, it is painfully real, its women are brilliant and hard working, the children climb trees, the men pick strawberries for their lover then deny it, frogs are in the pipes, and bindii patches infest the lawns. If there is an identifiable modern Australia out there with its distinctive images and its own cadences of speech, then such poetry is surely an essential part of it.”
— Kevin Brophy

Links to reviews for The Non-Sequitur of Snow:

Text Journal - Review by Monica Carroll

Cordite - Review by Siobhan Hodge

Plumwood Mountain - Review by Susan Fealy

NZ Poetry Shelf - Review by Paula Green

The Australian - Review by Michael Farrell

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Sonqoqui

Sonqoqui is a poetic tour-de-force that takes as its subject eco-critical readings of sacrifice in the historic Inca complex, while also exploring the formal possibilities of a non-fictional verse novella. In particular, Sonqoqui deploys a metaphor of weaving to construct the polyphonic voices of three Inca children who lived and died five hundred years ago.

Offered to the gods in a sacrificial capacocha ritual, which involved a many month journey from the heart of the Inca empire to the world’s highest historically active volcano, the mummified bodies of these children, along with hundreds of ritual objects, were discovered on the summit of Mt. Llullaillaco in 1999. This discovery was the result of an archaeological expedition led by Argentinean anthropologist and archaeologist Dr. María Constanza Ceruti, and National Geographic explorer and anthropologist, Dr. Johan Reinhard. Dry air, extreme cold and the conditions achieved by the nature of the ritual burial have resulted in bodies so well preserved it looks as though the three children are merely sleeping, and might wake at any time.

Frozen in time, these three children, aged fourteen, seven and five, are among the most eloquent mummified remains in the world. Yet to whom is this eloquence addressed and how is it interpreted? Chosen for sacrifice on account of their physical beauty, these children were taken from their respective families and brought to Cusco from differing regions of the Inca domain. It is believed the fourteen-year-old maiden may have been removed from her family while very young and raised in a special house for chosen women, an acllawasi, or House of the Sun Virgins, where she would have been instructed in the arts of weaving and the preparation of a fermented ceremonial maize drink called chicha. There she would have been kept separate from her community and prepared for a life of service.

Kocher travelled to Peru and to Argentina to meet with Dr. Ceruti and to walk the Inca trails that inform the weft and warp of this bioarchaelogically inflected text. An earler version of this manuscript won the Peter Steele Poetry Award in 2019. Part polyphonic biography, part travelogue, and part feminist critique, this is a genre-crossing book that has so far resisted easy classification.