GUNCOTTON
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 …
Three Poems by Martin Harrison
On 24 July, 2014, Martin Harrison sent along three poems to me. Two were recently published, one was new and hasn’t been read widely yet. I had asked Martin if he wanted to contribute a few works to a small …
By the River
Parked under trees on the other side of the dusty area where trailers often get abandoned a few days by truckies who don’t want to pick up far from the freeway and, yes, there’s a gap in the tree-cover opening …
Cloud
Smaller than gnats, almost imperceptible, glistening flies hovering in their edgeless clusters shaping and reshaping sideways through winter sun’s white light – mid-air thrips emanating between shadow and light-ray – thirty centimetres above damp long grass, matted weeds, cool earth, …
White Flowers
The air the wind the outside and outsize of what’s possible and imaginable clear and clean endeavour into the atmosphere of light on dark and glittering spaces where crimson rosellas swerve sideways into cascades of down-hanging white flowers they land …
Submission to Cordite 49: OBSOLETE Open!
Tracy Ryan in Western Australia Submission to this issue is now closed. Cordite 50: NO THEME IV with John Tranter is now open. Poetry for Cordite 49: OBSOLETE is guest-edited by Tracy Ryan What is obsolete? Are you obsolete … …
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 …
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 …
In Collaboration
‘We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.’ – Orson Welles First and foremost, my collaborations are a record of friendships. …
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 …
Cordite Ave vs. Electric Ave
I rediscovered these images from the Cordite vault this morning. Real photographs printed on photo paper. These were taken by David Prater in the final gasps of the 1990s I believe. Although the Cordite Ave (as threaded through Melbourne’s outer …
The Long and Short of It and That: Some Thoughts on Book Reviews
This post is in reply to John Dale’s recent piece in The Conversation, Here they are: the rules for book reviewing, and Peter Rose’s evisceration of it In defence of book reviewers in Australia, also in The Conversation. Dale airs …
Analogue Bodies: A Conversation with Tom Lee and Zoë Sadokierski
Analogue Bodies is a collection of essays by Tom Lee, materialised as set of illustrated books by Zoë Sadokierski. The project looks at different parts of, and events within, the human body and historical ways of depicting and making sense of them. It aims to humour and, on its day, to educate. It was presented as part of the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival 2014 at the Wheeler Centre.
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 …
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’ …
DAS GEDICHT + Cordite = Deutsch Poems of Campbell, Chong, Fischer, Leber, Skovron, Vickery and Wright
Cordite Poetry Review has teamed up with venerable German literary magazine, DAS GEDICHT, to publish translations of Australian works into German. These translations are directly aimed for German readership (this is to say that the English originals are not on …
Submission to Cordite 48: CONSTRAINT Open!
Poetry for Cordite 48: CONSTRAINT is guest-edited by Corey Wakeling. Submission is now closed for this issue, but open for Tracy Ryan’s Cordite 49: OBSOLETE. That poetry be raised to a pulpit of freedom and then celebrated as a picaresque …
Cassidy on with Feature Reviews and Future Themes
The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a superb legacy of robust and engaging feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and an engaged editorial acumen.
Trans-Tasman: Book Reviews and Best New Zealand Poetry 2013
It’s 2014. Time to expand / add to the Trans-Tasman conversation on poetics between Australia and New Zealand. The Best New Zealand Poems 2013 has now been published. Online only. Check it out. Congratulation to Murray Edmond, Anne Kennedy and …
Emerging Writers Festival Workshop: The Book as Experimental Form, Emergent Structure (Live Action Test-Drive)
In conjunction with the Emerging Writers Festival, Cordite Poetry Review is chuffed to present a workshop led by Astrid Lorange. Location: The Wheeler Centre Time: 6.30pm-8.30pm Available spaces: 16 Book your free attendance here. Be snappy about it! There are …
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 …
Notes from Mandalay, Burma
Stepped out at Mandalay airport, a good 40 minutes’ drive to Mandalay.
Bare dry landscape with the odd splash of colour from planted flowerbeds.
Shared the bus ride into town with Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, Sudah Shah (The King in Exile), Peter Popham (The Lady and the Peacock) and Dr John Casey. Casey is from the renowned mentor of Pascal Khoo-Thwee, author of the exquisite From the Land of Green Ghosts. As we motored past the road posts, John said here they measure not miles or kilometres but FURLONGS! He said he’d once been directed to a local post office as being ‘two furlongs away’. A large friendly town dominated by the moat-encircled Mandalay Palace grounds and Mandalay Hill awaited us.
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 …
Submission to Cordite 47: COLLABORATION Open!
THIS IS NOW CLOSED. Cordite 48.0: CONSTRAINT is accepting submissions. Poetry for Cordite 47: COLLABORATION is guest-edited by Helen Lambert (Moscow) and Louis Armand (Prague). What kind of poems are we looking for?: Two (or more) people working together to …
