CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Boyle

Peter Boyle is a poet and translator living and working on Dharug land. He has published eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions. As a translator, his books include Anima by José Kozer, The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo, and Three Poets: Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio and Jorge Palma. In 2013 he was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize. He holds a doctorate in Creative Arts from Western Sydney University.

After reading Ko Hyeong-ryeol’s ‘I am not in Erdene Zuu Monastery’

If every thought has its own melody and some melodies land flat, bouncing back onto the earth, while others launch a little way into the air and linger just slightly beyond us, thoughts expressed in words, even if addressed only …

Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS | Tagged

Apprenticeship

You had to go far inside the eye of a grasshopper, under tilting polar ice packs, under the taut shoulders of women rushing home, slinging a satchel of rice and vegetables into their haste, and then go further slipping between …

Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS | Tagged

Five Companions

1. Small spider Next to the strawberries I am cutting on the kitchen counter you step out intent on exploring the world. Gladly I leave you your portion of the visible field and the privacy of your millennial appetites.   …

Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS | Tagged

Awaiting the Death Sentence, Alone in the Pavilion of Lost Swans, the Emperor Plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 in D Minor

Extending from sleeves of pure gold the Emperor’s hands uncurl their fingers across the piano’s darkly chequered counters. The earth is suddenly spinning in fast motion. And the beautiful black androgynous hair sweeps down his back, defying age. How long …

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

3 Translated Samuel Trigueros Espino Poems

Image courtesy of Festival de Poesía El Salvador PIGS ‘I have seen friends Circe turned into pigs. Her wheel, her diamond. The pigs don’t know my hideouts, mercenaries of shadows.’ –Edilberto Cardona Bulnes I have beheaded pigs, but Circe insists …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Border Crossing

When you get there. At the frontier. It is very dangerous. Invisible precipices. Water sharp as knives. There are children playing between rocks. Many guns scan the bodies of the children. Suitcases tear open. A play of hands taking out …

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

2 Poems by Olga Orozco

Cartomancy The dogs that sniff out the lineage of ghosts, listen to them barking, listen to them tear apart the drawing of the omen. Listen. Someone approaches: the floorboards are creaking under your feet as if you will never stop …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

from Marosa di Giorgio’s Funeral carriages laden with watermelons

What a strange species is the species angel. When I was born I heard them say “Angel”, “Angels”, or other names. “Spikenard”, “Iris”. Foam that grows on branches, the most delicate porcelain increasing all by itself. Spikenard. Iris.

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Discovered in a Rock Pool

A star-shaped object rising up out of the water – five wavering arms, five spokes of a chariot wheel, five curved cylinders, at their centre a cluster of grey barnacles, small pearls, a silver light, the water that drips from …

Posted in 71: TOIL | Tagged

José Kozer’s ‘Wherein it is seen how buried always inside me is a Jew’ in English and Spanish

Wherein it is seen how buried always inside me is a Jew To howl out ballads, to hear plainchant up ahead, constantly, right to the end. To tread ears of corn on Judgement Day, and see wholegrain bread emerge from …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Jack Gilbert Gets ‘Foeted’

Anonymously they came for his bones hoping they would still hang with some flesh. ‘Blah blah’ said one, and ‘Yes yes’ said the other. Little too-mortal teeth ripping into the poems they knew were not the truth of it. ‘Oh …

Posted in 63: COLLABORATION | Tagged ,

8 Poems by Gastón Baquero

Gastón Baquero by Eduardo Margareto Born in Banes, Cuba, in 1916, Gastón Baqero grew up in the countryside, a rural beginning that figures as one element in his, in many ways very urbane, poetry. He was part of the Orígenes …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

“A hundred mute gods”

(A hundred mute gods, their eyes all put out, crowd together on a stone altar. Starved of blood. Lingering on in their hunger for one more sunset. A Sybil dozing lightly in an iron lung prophesies.) It may be a …

Posted in 47: NO THEME! | Tagged

Peter Boyle Reviews Yasuhiro Yotsumoto and Shuntaro Tanikawa

At the outset I will say that, though my own latest book Apocrypha was published by Vagabond Press, I hold no financial interest in the press nor any motivation to promote these two books other than the merits I find in them. The first collection under review, Yotsumoto’s Family Room, masterfully transcends the opposition between tradition and experiment; and Watashi, Tanikawa’s 20th collection to be published in English translation, certainly confirms this reviewer’s impression of being in the presence of a major poet.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , ,

My soul is wet with the tears of impossible things

“My soul is wet with the tears of impossible things” — Federico Garcia Lorca, ‘Todo será el corazón’ On the surface of the eternal soul hundreds of verses moistened with our lives that have grown sick and weary. I carry …

Posted in 07: NORTHERN TERRITORY | Tagged ,

The dark has taken root on all four walls

Translated with Peter Boyle “The dark has taken root on all four walls” — Kevin Hart, ‘Room’ Holding fast to this line of Kevin Hart through their deep roots I enter the experience of those prison days. Once more I …

Posted in 07: NORTHERN TERRITORY | Tagged ,

Everyday

You go to a restaurant and you eat a meal and you choke and die. It happens like that. You feel horny and you visit a sauna, get careless, and you catch AIDS and die. You open a present while …

Posted in 04: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Vlado Perlemuter Playing Ravel

The elegant sadness of this music is just the first layer. Beneath enter again the corsetry of a remote childhood, the bindings between the shoulder the neck the puffed belly. Find the white lonely fingers poised above a lake in …

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged