Paper Bark Press
Mines
1999, 104 pages, softcover, 215x150mm
ISBN 90 5704 046 8
Cover photograph: 'Beast on Ice' by Juno Gemes
This is Jennifer Maiden's powerful thirteenth collection of poetry. In it she significantly consolidates and expands her literary techniques and ethical explorations. This collection confirms Maiden's consistent belief that 'poetry is a form of three dimensional philosophy' as concise, voluptuous and valuable as prose in reaching new horizons in our perceptions of being and in developing our skills in humanity and survival.
'A most extraordinary writer.'
~ Prof. Marjory Agosin, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
'Mines, the latest collection from Jennifer Maiden, continues her past three decades' work researching "the problem of evil"... these days her method is to scrutinise North American news broadcasts received via satellite television and to listen to the testimony of recovering victims in her role as writer-in-residence at the NSW Torture and Trauma Rehabilitation Service. The actions and presentation of American and United Nations political figures like General Norman Schwarzkopf, Madeleine Albright, Richard Butler et al, are analysed alongside a courteous boy grown into a murderer, the bleak irony of collecting beautiful stamps from Rwanda, or whether S&M is a component of political torture ... Maiden has the acuity, the wit, and a kind of true-grit dedication to her family and to justice to carry off this important project without becoming maudlin or despairing. Precious jewels and humbler sequins shimmer alchemically in many poems, and a bee trapped and then set free from a fairy floss machine at Australia's Wonderland can be transformed into a liberating menopausal symbol in Maiden's complex world-view.'
~ Pam Brown, Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend, January 2000
'Jennifer Maiden's Mines is a mine of swirling meditations, reworking, repeating and interweaving motifs and refrains: CNN, Madeleine Albright, poets and family. She writes in a feminist reclaiming of feminine language – "the stone is cervix red" – with ruminations on politics, sex, gemstones (the white opal "downhearted as a shell"), beauty, evil, love. Maiden's varied and shaped line lengths analyse and inhabit the world of current events, edifying and heuristic.'
~ Gig Ryan, The Age
Mines won The Kenneth Slessor NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry 2000. In February 1999, Jennifer Maiden was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Prize for lifetime achievement in literature and was shortlisted for the 2000 Age Book of the Year prize for poetry.