CONTRIBUTORS

Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. She is the author of Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009), a chapbook Seastrands (Vagabond, 2011) and A Kinder Sea (UQP, 2020). She is the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). Her latest essay ‘Plath Traps’ is online at Sydney Review of Books.

Closer

A clothesline dandles rows of vacant newborn jumpsuits. The way I made a life for you and you fell away from it. Worn sheets ghost a whipped branch, swing the wind to haunt me, opening folds of loss and hope. …

Posted in 106: OPEN | Tagged

Inclined

The word love is merely a sign that means something like the way to the mountain. Mark Doty, Dog Years What the mountain thinks, you can’t know. When it leans the weight of its shadow on you, tall, how much …

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Introduction to Rachael Briggs’s Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski The polka originated in nineteenth-century Bohemia. A dance for two, it is reputedly simple to learn. Three steps and a hop, in fast duple time, with various steps – Turning Basic, Pursuit and Waltz Galop …

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NO THEME III Editorial

This issue began with the idea of an open house and a couplet from Roethke’s poem of the same name:

My heart keeps open house, 
My doors are widely swung.

It continued with a few openings and closings of the Submittable gate over summer, and wasn’t long before this imagined poetic house had its doors and windows propped wide; its lawns and verandas filled with voices.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

Submission to Cordite 46: NO THEME III Now Open!

Poetry for Cordite 46: NO THEME III is guest-edited by Felicity Plunkett I am interested in the idea of architecture as a way of capturing the place of a ‘no theme’ issue … amidst Cordite‘s many themed ones. In the …

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged ,

Launch of Tricia Dearborn’s ‘The Ringing World’

The Ringing WorldAmidst its many echoes, the idea of a ‘ringing world’ conjures up for me a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Words’, in which words are axes ‘after whose stroke the wood rings’. This ringing takes the form of words’ echoes travelling off like horses. Late in the poem these horses reappear ‘dry and riderless’ but nevertheless continuing on with their ‘indefatigable hooftaps’.

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Felicity Plunkett Reviews Phyllis Perlstone and Meredith Wattison

Phyllis Perlstone's the edge of everything, which was short-listed for the 2008 Kenneth Slessor Prize, is an imaginative cartography, its careful perceptions laying out ways of looking at the crucial ideas the book returns to: ideas about love and the ways it might fade or be lost; about violence and humanity; about perception itself, and how words work to map its contours.

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Felicity Plunkett Reviews Julian Croft and Yve Louis

Watching waves breaking on the shore, the rhythms that emerge are, of course, only part of the larger pattern of the ever-mobile natural world we seem to observe. The poems in Julian Croft's Ocean Island suggest the occluded and multifarious that lies beneath the surface, gesturing towards the tidal, and larger worlds that dwarf human concerns.

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