Jennifer MacKenzie

While interrogating the tragedy of colonialism and the often fraught nature of exploration and discovery, The Wallace Line: A Poem honours co-existence, a world of merging borders, where the oud can resonate along with the bird of paradise, the blue pigment in a Titian painting with the sound of a Javanese gamelan in moonlight. In celebrating trajectory as artefact, the...

At the time of the construction of Borobudur in the ninth century, Buddhism had been established in Java for several centuries. Mackenzie's Borobudur, an exquisite long poem, tells the story of its legendary architect, Gunavarman, and of Indonesia's mystical monument with cultural understanding, sensitivity, and great feeling. Like Gunavarman, by the poem's end, Mackenzie becomes 'a dot on the horizon',...