Jennifer Compton PARKER & QUINK Indigo 1 74027 248 X Cathy Young THE YUGOSLAV WOMEN AND THEIR PICKLED HERRINGS Cornford 0 646 43101 3 Reviewed by Philip Harvey in the Australian Book Review, 2004 Jennifer Compton creates uneasy feelings. Her monologues come from desperate people, frantic, locked out, locked in. They all have some secret and are going to tell us, if it takes subtlety or no subtlety. What saves their querulous, impossible concerns from turning into rants or whinges, is Compton’s actorly control of voice. These are poems of original intent and purposive control. The shocking ideas at the centre of her poems are tempered by a voice trying to master the extreme reality they relate. Her dramatic proclivities inform her work at every turn: a character is usually in a place they don’t want to be, new circumstances have to be negotiated with an old map of the mind. On occasion she even writes directions straight into the verse (“I’ll shift from my mother’s voi...