Olivia Macassey
official website
Love in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
NZ$21.95,
Titus Books 2005
"These love poems are extremely beautiful with a solid intellectual
base. Love and courtship are important, but more weighty themes address
the elusiveness of being in a world where the virtual often provides a working
synecdoche for bodily experience. […] In rich and beautifully chosen
words, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction offers a disquieted
world of shadow, an intermediate state where reality is where you find it,
not where you might feel entitled to find it."
— Brenda Allen, Takahe (Issue 56, 2005)
"“Her poetry is deeply lyrical in a manner that’s not specifically
tied to the printed page and which belongs to the spoken word as much as
it does to its visual representation […] Best of all, though, is the
totality of the experience Macassey’s poetry offers – the complex
variety and subtlety of aesthetic flavours and the sensations it allows
readers to share with her.”
— Alistair Paterson,
Poetry NZ (Issue 29, 2004)"
"This poetry is useful; the voice treats itself with compassion, respects
its responsiveness, lets in the chaotic complexity of the world, refuses
a hierarchy of poetic value, and makes itself at home. This poetry details
movement within what to me is a familiar psychic world, a particular contemporary
subjectivity in which the self is the space between eclectic, vivid effects.
This poetry is very beautiful, even as it constructs a pattern out of all-too-familiar
and destabilizing worldly stimulants."
— Will Christie, Brief (issue 35, 2007)
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