CONTRIBUTORS

Kevin Brophy

Kevin Brophy’s latest book is the collection of short fiction The Lion in Love (Finlay Lloyd 2023). His recent poetry collection, Look at the Lake (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018) was awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. He is a past winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay. His poetry has appeared in many Best Australian Poems volumes and major national anthologies, including the recent Anthology of Australian Prose Poems (Melbourne University Press, 2020) and The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Poetry (FarFlung Editions, 2022). He was writer-in-residence at the Australia Council’s B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome in 2015, and at the Keesing Studio in Paris in 2019/20. He was a co-founding editor (with Myron Lysenko) of Going Down Swinging and a managing editor at Five Islands Press. He is patron of Melbourne Poets Union, Director of the Five Islands Prize for a first book of poetry, and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. In 2021 he received an Order of Australia award (AM) for his services to education and creative writing. He has lived in the inner-city suburb of Brunswick, not far from where he was born, for the past four decades. These streets, his home, and his back yard have been the source of many poems.

Carp

—as if its live weight is there beside my hand but with a Korean meaning I cannot fathom (each creature battered, vulnerable, caught, carries un-read meanings marked across a manuscript of sinew, scar and muscle) I read on into your …

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Light

Today I cleaned two long drops of venetian blinds. It was like rewriting a poem by discovering on each line dust, grease, coffee splashes, brittleness burned into every word. I felt like one of your shop assistants with no line …

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Translating

Saying, for instance, The last time I spoke to you might not be the last time I speak to you Following the path of a writer’s words sewn into the earth with a green thread and remembering nothing of what …

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Review Short: Libby Hart’s Wild

Poetry might be whispering these days, but only fools fail to hear it. The whisper might be the tough sibilance of protest, it might be the swirl of nostalgia for what will soon be lost and irretrievable, it might be the resilient, gnomish murmur that tells of what cannot be suppressed, and cannot either ever be quite directly expressed. And so, Huginn and Muninn open Libby Hart’s new collection of poetry.

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The Redactions

2014 intercepted electronic communications, DOD… aphorism identified as a threat to national security. The aphorism envies the novel, the novel, of course, envies the haiku and the haiku envies the brief life of the leaf. – Gen PJ Burke, U.S. …

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Kevin Brophy Reviews Geoff Page

In a 2007 review of one of Geoff Page’s previous verse novels, Lawrie & Shirley, Peter Goldsworthy names Page as a verse-novel ‘multiple offender’ in the excellent company of Murray, Porter, Wearne and Rubinstein. Goldsworthy approaches discussion of the form by reflecting, ‘If poetry is the most ancient literary form, as old as music, then the verse novel is surely the most ancient form of poetry, using the word novel loosely’ (Australian Literary Review, May 2007). The long and respectable polygamous marriage of poetry with narrative and history was, we might say, dissolved during the Romantic period, allowing the novel to find its ecological niche – and more than a niche, a whole territory.

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Hard Rubbish

The four star fridge is on its side, surprised To find sunlight on its shelves, ice tray dry And its arctic green inside slowly warmed. Hopes once hung with suits in wardrobes are out with posters of the stars we …

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