'Granite Falls' - "a most accomplished poem, a hymn, if you will, to the power of nature; the human poet is present only as 'me' not 'I', acted upon by the strength of the natural environment. The interplay of grammar and layout is impressive: the sequential grammatical sentences flow over and through the solid regularity of the five line stanzas.This interplay lends itself to symbolic interpretation by the individual reader."
Highly Commended Award, The Society of Women Writers National Writing Competition 2024, Judges Report
sifting fire writing coast - the poet is working there, amongst the ashes and the dust and raking over the hard-baked soil, writing about crisis, and fires and asylum seekers and ruined lakes. Using a variety of forms: list poems, prose, stanza-ed poem, non-standard typography, she deftly explores and sifts through the particulars of place and being and our shaky connections to the land as settlers on this arid country.
To be clear, I like this collection, it is engaging, purposeful and gutsy poetry. More importantly thought, it shows what good poetry can do. In a time of polycrisis, poetry like this shows us how to talk about place and history and trauma; it toughens us up and gets us ready for what's coming next.
'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)
'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' - 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'...
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
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