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POET OF THE DAY
Jennifer Maiden has been one of the most striking voices to emerge from a generation that included John Forbes, Martin Johnston, Robert Adamson and Michael Dransfield, as well as Joanne Burns, Pam Brown and Vicki Viidikas. In an era when the privileging of masculinity was starting to be called just that, women poets embodied in their work the changing roles of women.

The questioning critical voice in Jennifer Maiden's first book Tactics (1974) is obsessive yet self-deprecating. Her elegant, assured language loudly signals a new talent, and her prolific and constantly varying output since then has shown this talent to be honed and always developing, often in unexpected directions โ€“ including prose fiction. In Mines (1999), her thirteenth volume of poetry, she reclaims specifically feminine language โ€“ "vaginal red" โ€“ and writes a new form of mini-sequence, which Maiden calls 'cluster' poems. These cluster poems have almost the same start or the same end, but the rest of the poem veers off each time, so the repetition is like a motif. These poems question notions of voice and time, as if revealing parallel or expanding universes. The paintings of Georgia O'Keefe, gemstones and the poet's daughter are some of the actual inspirations in Mines, spinning the poems out into endless reflection.
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