readings & reviews

readings

2023 Dec, poetry reading and launch of my debut poetry collection  sifting fire writing coast, at Coledale Community Hall, Coledale

2023 Nov, poetry reading, launch of 34-37 Degrees South - 2023 - The Country Edition, at Well Thumbed Books, Cobargo. This anthology can be purchased at the South Coast Writers Centre website

A recording of my poem 'Looking for the Missing Gravestones' can be heard at https://southcoastwriters.org/country-readings-1/#looking%20for%20the%20missing

2022, 1 May, poetry reading and discussion of practice, at South Coast Writers  at Bundanon

2021, 20 September, featured poet, reading fire poetry at 'That Poetry Thing That is on at Smiths Every Monday', Smith's Canberra

2021 featured creative and poetry reading in the award winning documentary 'We Are Conjola - our fire our story'. We are Conjola - our fire our story' facebook page ,  view the trailor for 'We are Conjola'

2019 poetry reading, launch of FourW thirty: New Writing-Pearl, Wagga Wagga

2019 poetry reading, launch of Not Very Quiet Issue 5: Earth Poems, Smith's, Canberra

2018 poetry reading, Wollongong arts precinct

2018 poetry reading, Readings and Music in Colour, Wollongong Art Gallery

2017 poetry reading, launch of fourW twenty-eight, Gleebooks, Glebe

2014 poetry reading, Patrons Prize for Poetry, PCWC, Perth

2013 poetry reading, Glen Phillips Poetry Prize, PCWC, Perth

2013 invited poet, Voicebox, Fremantle

2011 invited poet reading on Radio Joondalup, Twin Cities, Joondalup WA

2007 invited speaker, ‘Canberra as Character’, Canberra Readers and Writers Festival: Deserts and Desertion Landscape and Escape, National Library of Australia, Canberra

2005 prose reading and book launch of  Frieda and the cops, Gorman House, Canberra

2004 invited speaker, English in Australia Club, at the Southern Cross Club, Canberra

2004 paper delivered, ‘Transworld women: speaking ‘truth’ from a silent past’ at Palimpsests: Transforming Communities, Curtin Humanities Annual Graduate Research Conference, Curtin University, Perth

2004 paper delivered, ‘Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: the once ‘bad’ can make ‘good’ narratives’ at Work in Progress Humanities Postgraduate Conference-Bad Ideas?, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Brisbane

2000 invited poet, 'Twilight Readings in the Bogong',Word Festival Canberra

1999 poetry reading, Suddenly the Lake, Weereewa: Lake George, Canberra Museum and Gallery

reviews

'Troopy' - Elanna Herbert's diary of an abandoned burnt-out car - material traces of the catastrophic fire in her home town - brings powerfully to consciousness the desolation wrought by environment crises. 
Introduction to Axon 10(2)-manifestos, diatribes and creative interventions

'Sydney to Perth: chasing dusk' – thoughts during a plane journey, sewn through with excellent visual and colour imagery. Very effective use of half finished thoughts and observations, much in the manner of thinking. The poem concludes with a very engaging last stanza where “autocorrect is killing my words”. A vivid reimagining of a journey all too familiar with many West Australians.
Ethel Webb Blundell Literary Competition 2020, Judges Report

'Flying WA' - (2nd Place) I loved the opening lines - 'The Indian ocean brings the /abrupt line...aquamarine fades/cut with pale calico...' As seems appropriate in a poetic mapping of over one-third of Australia, ...this is a free-verse composition but uses large gaps in many lines and certain groups of inset lines to give form that denies similarity to normal prose. The poet's special creative control of language is thus emphasised. “Flying WA” predictably gives us vivid sequenced glimpses of terrain that mining has made familiar to us, even its devastation of country precious to the Aboriginal people. ...The aerial photograph-style images show the contrast of beauty and devastation resulting from large-scale mining—‘an open-cut’s/cyanic lake deep azure copper green/floods the next. Beside the tailings dam faded/orange bleeds a contrast’ continues even to the poem’s conclusion ‘Lost baseline geology of the West'...  

we have here a very West Australian poem that raises more than the more domestic issues in many poems. 
Ethel Webb Blundell Literary Competition 2018, Judges Report

'Processing Afghan Asylum Seekers' - A West Australian (political) sensibility permeates ‘other’ worlds. Elanna Herbert’s reflection on asylum seekers makes powerful connections between two disinfranchised groups of men with grace and clarity. 
Rashida Murphy, Marie O'Rourke, Josephine Taylor & David Thomas Henry Wright reviewing Westerly: New Creative 2016

'Thinking of Last Night' - Elanna Herbert has an almost cinematic style of framing. Herbert’s charged agitation in ‘Thinking of Last Night’ holds all the edgy poetry of the best handheld camera work. 
Lucy Dougan quoted in Breath of the Sea 2012