Recent Work Press (2026)
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
A thistle is a plant famous for its spikes. This proves an apt motif for Kate Maxwell’s third collection concerned as it is with the pricklier facts of contemporary life: grief, ageing, family history, environmental unease and the disappointments that arrive with experience. The poems do not seek to smooth these matters into consolation. Rather, they ask what it might mean to remain attentive – to memory, to damage, to the comic grotesquerie of social life, and to possibilities for tenderness even when ‘life doesn’t bloom the way you expect’ and so compromise is needed.
Maxwell is a teacher and writer from Sydney who has been published in Australian and international literary magazines. She has two previous poetry collections – Never Good at Maths (IP Press, 2021) and Down the Rabbit Hole(Ginninderra Press) but has also published work in a range of genres including speculative fiction, flash fiction and young adult fiction.
Across three sections, the poems in Thistle traverse private and public worlds, but the book’s emotional core lies in its engagement with familial loss and the instability of memory framed by wider global decay. A number of poems are concerned with the age-related mental decline of the speaker’s mother to whom the collection is dedicated, but also with the afterlife of childhood, suggesting that remembrance is not an orderly return to the past. It arrives in fragments: physical gestures, habitual objects, unbidden images and phrases that remain when narrative coherence has begun to fail:
I cannot see the forest for the trees
she sad laughs
on her better days
that’s when going
isn’t ending
but a sad return (8)
In these poems, Maxwell’s restraint is evident: rather than converting grief into revelation, the poet permits it to remain unresolved and uneven. The poems recognise that the work of witnessing another person’s decline involves helplessness as much as care, and that love does not necessarily produce understanding.
The recurring forest imagery is powerful in this collection. A forest is a place of narrative and childhood imagination, but in Thistle it becomes a landscape of disorientation: a space where there is a constant ‘searching … trying to recall the question / she can’t answer / muddled / in the mists of what she thinks she knows’ (8) or attempting to follow a trail that may disappear.
The poet uses a fairytale analogy of the breadcrumb trail but not in a sentimental way; rather, it shows how early wonder is revised by later knowledge:
Like an ancient Gretel,
she’s still leaving trails,
flagging out her one-way journey
into deeper woodlands,
losing pieces of herself
along the darkening path
Across the collection, the child’s openness to the strange and immense – the night sky; birds, lizards and other creatures; distance; mystery – persists, but is haunted by adulthood’s knowledge of mortality, technological intrusion and the slide to ecological disaster. Poems are interested in what survives this revision – not innocence exactly, but a capacity for wonder that has become more difficult and more conscious as ageing occurs. In ‘Kaleidoscope’ (10), for example:
Even now
a flash of clarity
something that her damaged frontal lobe’s forgotten
a name, a meal, a silly rhyme
is still a one-eyed squint
into a cylinder of light and mirrors
This movement between the intimate and the expansive is one of the book’s strengths. Maxwell repeatedly shows that private feeling is entangled with the conditions of the wider world. The poems do not treat social commentary as a separate political duty appended to more personal writing. Instead, irritation at public behaviour, suspicion of wealth and power and anxiety about the arrogance of human superiority emerge in ethically attuned poems.
In ‘Colossus’ (57-58):
Aggrandized in effigies as giants who stride
the sea; colossus legends in our dreams
reduced to fish-pecked rubble
on a silent ocean floor when earth yawns out
her slightest shudder. We Yertle ourselves
to the top of the stack, caring little
for the shells we crack along the climb …
… How dare it be higher and brighter than us!
The billionaires cry, punching holes into space …
Several poems deploy satire to make this point, and Maxwell’s comic voice is one of Thistle’s most distinctive features. Her targets include entitlement, consumer impatience, extravagant wealth, technological bureaucracy and the persistent human fantasy of mastery. Yet beneath the sharpness of the satire is a larger scepticism about the stories people tell themselves: that convenience is a right, that accumulation is achievement and that the non-human world exists primarily for human use.
Maxwell’s wit often works through deflation. The poet makes us aware of bodily awkwardness, petty behaviour or absurdly inflated self-regard. For example, in ‘Basking’ (62) the poet ridicules the Mogul’s ‘getting hitched again / at ninety-three. He can’t seem to make one last / past his plans for an afternoon nap / and world domination’ and in ‘Prove Humanity,’ (82-83) satire is generated by the poet imagining future CAPTCHA challenges set for the sentient – ‘…like …/state whether the emperor / dons a blonde or orange / hairpiece (if he’s wearing one at all) or whether / genocide is simply / miliary method / sanctioned by belief: / – to prove your / own humanity.’
Comic poems perform an important structural function, lightening engagements with grief, ecological anxiety and ageing that might risk becoming overly solemn while at the same time making powerful and salient points. Humour alongside loss is an acknowledgment that in life we are surrounded by binaries, and that frustration and sorrow are not separate emotional categories: a person can be grieving and irritated, politically alert and ridiculous, disillusioned and still capable of delight. These poems show a close understanding of the varying tones of ordinary life, where an encounter with bureaucracy or a stranger’s bad manners sit alongside deep anxiety about what kind of ugly world our children will be left to live in.
There are a wide array of approaches to the poem shape and style in this collection, ranging from poems that sprawl across the page like ‘Passing Go’ (64) that starts with a car chase involving the artist known as Prince, and (almost) ends with the line ‘There’s no bling if you don’t pass / Go,’ a landscape layout /turned page poem titled ‘Lulu in LA’ (60-61), as well as three-, four- and five-line stanza poems. The playful variety of approaches works well to balance the daring of Maxwell’s social, political and environment critique and the pain and sadness captured in the more personal poems.
A thistle, despite, or perhaps even because of its beauty, grows where conditions are difficult. It has the power to sting. Here are 54 remarkable poems that find beauty in imperfection and resilience, tackling many of the most challenging issues of our time but also taking us on a trip through childhood wonder. I recommend this collection to you.