CONTRIBUTORS

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s poetry prize. She has also been awarded the Christopher Brennan and Philip Hodgins Memorial Medals for excellence in Literature. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005-2016. Her work has been studied in schools and universities and has been translated into several languages.

http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/beveridge-judith

Winner and Commended Writers in the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Val Vallis Award

Helen Lucas has won the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Val Vallis Prize with ‘Heirloom’; Sarah Rice wins second prize with ‘My Time in Govie Housing Draws to a Close’ and Rae White wins the Highest Queensland entry for ‘The last …

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A King Sends a Delegation to Meet a Clan in the South

We’ve heard they make music by tying tin pots to donkeys, yanking on the ropes then beating them with wooden goads. We’ve heard their highest cultural achievement is a poetry that never veers from the subject of spitting in public …

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2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award Winner

Damen O’Brien is the winner and the runner up to the 2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award, managed by our longtime partner, Queensland Poetry Festival.

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‘You’re never disembodied from the action’: Dylan Frusher Interviews Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry and throughout her writing life she has received multiple awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

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Driving to Broken Hill

Distance—continuous, ungestured. Crows on fence-wire-watch stretching into a haze. When a kestrel hovers it’s an abundance— like water, or a horizon with a hill. We pass towns, streets written-off by dogs and half-asleep dreamers. Those who live at the edges …

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NO THEME VI Editorial

It was a great privilege, if a little overwhelming (I had about 1,800 poems to read), to edit this edition of Cordite Poetry Review and, as it is not themed, I had the luxury of choosing poems on various subjects. I have tried to make the issue varied but also unified by my aesthetic principles.

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Introduction to Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses

Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses is a complex exploration of identity, an identity exposed in clear yet layered language, a language that takes us to the core of what he has experienced as a ‘queer Muslim Arab Australian from Western Sydney, from a broke and broken family.’

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Submission to Cordite 80: NO THEME VI

Poetry for Cordite 80: NO THEME VI is guest-edited by Judith Beveridge. Here’s what I’m looking for: poems of fewer than 100 lines, on any theme or style. So that’s about as succinct as you can get. Judith worked Cordite …

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Resort Town

Sunset here is the distant roar of motorbikes, and down Pacific Street, I hear the enormous rage that fills the mosquito’s head. Flies still circle the day’s unalterable groove. A gull pierces the distance like a sail needle. Summer’s already …

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Rory

We’d often see Rory outside the shed trying to classify the clouds coming in on the evening wind — clouds he thought were the farm’s clip of fine-grained wool. On clear blue days he’d strike match after match and try …

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Judith Beveridge’s Twelve Highlights from 2014

Throughout 2014, Judith Beveridge selected one poem per month to spotlight in Cordite Poetry Review, and she delivered excellent choices … writing a bit to each selection. We have compiled them all here in one article. Enjoy!

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: At Willabah

I forget who it was who said that the writer needs to be ‘holy in small things’, but I think there is a great deal of truth in that. That’s one reason why I’m attracted by Todd Turner’s poem ‘At Willabah’. Here, the poet guides us through the details of the landscape in a not dissimilar way to the deep engagement with particulars in such poems as Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’.

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When the Wind Stopped

I read somewhere that the words ‘ekphrasis’ and ‘ekphrastic’ had at one stage a reference only in the Oxford dictionary, but nowadays these words are very much part of poets’ vocabularies and practices and most poets at some stage write …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Myrrh

Pablo Neruda said this: It’s the words that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down. I love words so much… The unexpected …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Laneway Tom

With a distant glance and nod to Alfred, Lord Noyes’s poem, ‘The Highwayman’, Paul Scully in ‘Laneway Tom’ creates a very modern tale, one that could be playing out in the lanes and backstreets of any contemporary city. The imagery …

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2014 Val Vallis Award Winner: ‘Not Fox Nor Axe’

Chloe Wilson’s poem ‘Not Fox Nor Axe’ has won the 2014 Val Vallis Award. Part-travelogue, part-mosaic of memento mori, ‘Not Fox Nor Axe’ provokes the reader with an extravaganza of multi-layered detail as it elides historical and actual Central American …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Cocky Farming

Robert Frost once said about writing poetry, ‘You gotta get dramatic’. Caroline Ross’s poem, ‘Cocky Farming’ dramatically enacts the hardship, fight and struggle that can beset Australian farmers, the worst foes being harsh weather and unsympathetic banks. I enjoyed the …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Calyptorhynchus funereus

I know bird poems have become almost a cliché in Australian poetry, but I have a great fondness for the topic and so I couldn’t resist Dimitra Harvey’s evocatively brocaded poem about yellow-tailed black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus funereus. Astute observation is …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Sunflowers

What strikes me in Andrew Stuckgold’s poem ‘Sunflowers’ are the graceful curves of the syntax, and the way he has masterfully employed sound. Reading the first sentence, which runs over three and a half lines, we hear that the ‘o’ …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: The H Word

There are many levels of identified pain in Omar Sakr’s poem: deprivation, despair, violence, oppression, shame, mortality, the brutal inevitability of loss and disenfranchisement, yet the poem’s interrogation of these issues is often playful and comic, tender and deftly alert …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: October

What strikes me as most compelling about Nadia Bailey’s poem ‘October’, is the way in which she portrays the horror of the October bushfires in the NSW Blue Mountains by telling it ‘slant’. The poem is redolent with suggestion and …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Kalutara

For many poets, place is an enormous point of inspiration. These places may not necessarily be places where the poet physically resides or has resided in, but they may be the imaginative or spiritual places where the poet is most …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Prawn Heads, Oil Rigs and Infidelity – Kuala Lumpur 1977

‘Prawn Shells Oil Rigs and Infidelity – Kuala Lumpur 1977’ is a highly dramatic poem full of tension and suspense. The poet builds these elements into the poem through the astute use of short, sharp phrases which also deliver their …

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: a poem is not a meme

Miro Sandev’s poem ‘poetry is not a meme’ is an ironic take on poetry’s refusal to be subsumed by technological culture. In the octave of the sonnet, the poet uses web jargon and terminology in intelligent and witty ways, effectively …

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