I love the chaos and possibility that an open theme edition brings – the wonder and hope in casting a net wide, and carefully sifting through the magic that returns. As is often the case when editing something, I wish I could have chosen many more works to be published. The standard of work was exceptional, and I’m told there was a record number of poems submitted.
Common themes emerged during the reading process – war, inequality, love, and the fleeting nature of life itself; childhood, ageing and the bonds and fractures between generations; the beauty and destruction of the natural world; the capacity of art to illuminate; the pollution and pull of Capitalism.
In the callout for this edition of Cordite, I encouraged poets to move me – and move me, they did. Many of these poems achieve that most wondrous of accomplishments: rendering the everyday extraordinary. “The jeans left still pressed into the vinyl / of the passenger seat, and the slushie wilted / into a flower” in the poem ‘Dutchess Country’. The awkward familiar spectacle of wrestling a furniture item home on the train in ‘A second-hand lamp is the very thing that will save me’. The delightfully absurd musing of the poem ‘Dinosaur Phase’, which equates God’s species-design preoccupations with the obsessions of a small child at play with figurines. The joyful school-holiday nostalgia of the poem ‘The Visit from the North Queensland Cousins’: “Waiting on the porch / we watched you / explode from the back door of the station wagon…”
The poems in this edition probe what it is to be human – to be capable of both fierce love, and abject neglect. They explore what it is to feel safe in the world, and what it is to live under constant bombardment. The poems in this edition are scattered with both fatigue and hope. In these poems, folks give birth to, and nurture, new generations, and tend gently to loved ones as they exit this world. These poems, varied in voice, structure and style, are funny, grief-stricken, disturbing, comforting, soothing, illuminating and challenging.
I feel his editorial demands of me brevity – for the work itself will speak loudly, and the poems will sing for themselves.
