Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Poetic Obituaries: The Monkey's Mask remains her [Dorothy Porter's] best known

work. Set in Sydney it features a lesbian detective, Jill, who falls in love with a doctor, Diana, while investigating the mysterious Mickey who writes poetry. A series of monologues with constantly changing perspectives, it contains some of the finest English-language lesbian love poetry, easily comparable with the American gay poet Adrienne Rich, who never wrote such a sequence: Her breasts are not my breasts/Under her dress/they push towards my hands/… Diana's tongue whirls/in my mouth/like a dissolving aspro/like knives on a chariot wheel in Ben Hur.

from WA Today: Poet pushed boundaries and encouraged others
also The Australian: Poet with a tongue of fire
also The Guardian: Dorothy Porter

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