Broken Ocean

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Margaret Bradstock

“What was missing was the cries of seabirds that surrounded
the boat on previous voyages …” – Ivan Macfadyen, yachtsman.

In the past we’d seen birds following the boat
resting on our mast like sentinels
or wheeling in the distance
feeding on pilchards.
The birds were missing because there were no fish
no sound but wind in the rigging waves knocking
against the hull the steady thud of debris.

Now a mother-ship’s trawling the reef
stripping it day after day
working at night under floodlight.
We feared pirates but Melanesian men
came alongside with gifts sugar-bags full of fish.
All they wanted was tuna the rest dumped as rubbish
in the maw of that rotting sea.

After we left Japan lights of small moored ships at its edges
battered freighters and patrol boats the ocean itself was dead
the shape of a tumorous whale rolled on the surface
like the dome of an old Buddhist stupa
or an alien power-plant.

Power-poles snapped off by the last killer wave trail wires
in the middle of the ocean yellow plastic buoys synthetic rope
fishing lines and nets our propeller entangled
as though in a mangrove swamp.
No turtles dolphins flurries of birds
or sharks for 3,000 nautical miles.

In the waters above Hawaii you could see right into the depths
skeletal as xray artworks collages of modernity
debris all the way down soft-drink bottles
pieces of junk the size of a truck a factory chimney
sticking out of the water.
Sailing through this garbage dump plastic and flotsam
scraping the length of the boat

we’d push for a fleet to clean up the mess
if environmental damage from burning the fuel
wasn’t worse than just leaving it there.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Here

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Patricia Sykes

Stepping from white into black
from day into night.
Called out by who knows what.
The night jasmine perhaps, the fireflies,
the rising coolness of the water tank.
All day a folding of facts, thoughts,
wants, packing a new history
to take back on the plane, south
to where the ticket flies, your name
a stub, a booking with an address
devoid of the self you thought

was you so little effort needed
to embrace unpeopled hectares,
stars crawling over the hill
like incandescent spiders, a sudden
owl in whisper flight, a lethal silence
of beak and claw which you permit
to trap your small squeak of fright;
listening then through the night
to Earth’s silent orbit, wishing for
a way to unmanufacture noise, for
a way to keep yourself timelocked,
here, where your loudening city
has no foothold, no residence.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

(Late at Night Bruny Island)

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Ken Bolton

here
in the bookshelves of the
holiday house is a book of
John’s poems—also
Les—a fat spine
appropriately.
Why is that here?
Masochism?
I am unlikely to read it.
Anyway,
I wonder what John’s got to say—
this time.
*
The rest of the shelf
is novels others have left.
*
Across
the table from me
my jacket is draped over the chair,
reminding me a little of John—
a presence and an absence. It
looks more like what he would wear
than I would—& it’s empty,
no one there.
Why write
so often about John Forbes? I knew him
only so well.
To
rise to some challenge
—test—
or ‘occasion’, yes?
(No?) (Maybe?)

The radio—
ABC from Hobart—
is playing: very good music
that I don’t know—
in the adjoining room, so it’s
both on but ignored
easily enough, as if I’m
alone more or less—
opposite the chair & jacket,
looking at it, but sometimes
at the things between us on the table
a thin-striped table cloth, blue &
white—pens pencils salt & pepper shakers—
books—that Cath & I are reading—
one of those yellow Spirax notebooks
A-5, a small stub of candle …
a tape measure,
also black & yellow—black with some yellow detailing.
Stuff.
The light is mounted
behind me, on the wall,
rather than above:
the room is lit like a bar
or cantina—& they are those sort
of doors opposite, too—
bar-room half doors, open,
leading into the middle space
(& the radio).
Low ceiling, stucco walls, an earthen,
nougat-magenta The shelves—
the book shelves—
since I began with them,
are on my left, at
the far end of the room.

This is not the sort of poem
John would write.
He would not see the point.
And in fact I don’t see the point
as yet, tho I may hope to find one.

Christ knows where.

The
news is on now, following
cricket all day. It would have been
worth following it
most of the last decade, for
Kerry O’Keefe’s commentary—
his wheezy laugh, his humour—
tho I didn’t. (John might have.
But John has been gone
a bit too long.)

I always
try to write something
when I’m down here, on Bruny.
Start
& wait & see where they go. John chimes
with the cricket—& maybe with
the cowboy bar-doors—but otherwise
he is a bit urban
to gel with the island—
& holidays. Or is that just
John-as-I-conceive-him? He
happens to be on the shelf tho.
That is a fact.
I look at the poems,
from the back: ‘Love Poem’, ‘Night Shift’,
‘History of Nostalgia’
“ … attitude
is the poems’ currency, an asset
only when it is spent” it says
on the cover. I wonder if John
wrote that copy.

I wonder
where I am going with this?

A long time trying to locate an attitude
or summon one—like someone scowling,
or non-committal, leaning against a wall
(near a corrugated iron water tank—
as I envisage it—now—tho how or why?)
who pushes himself away, finally, with
some resolve

(spits in the grass?)

throws smoke away / spits in the grass

Tho this is uncharacteristically—of me—
not quite urban, & Australian, tho
I am an Australian.

Like 24 million other people

—Is that my attitude?—

more or less the same, more or less different; up late
in my case; trying to write poetry

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Art Tatum

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Geoff Page

1909 — 1956

The legends and the anecdotes
are only half of it;
Charlie Parker early on,

night-club kitchen, washing plates
just to hear the sound
then saying as saxophonist

‘I wish I could play like
Tatum’s right hand’;
the story too when Heifetz brought

Sergei Rachmaninoff to listen,
the pianist and composer saying,
‘My God, it’s hot in here’;

then Heifetz, with a grin:
‘Only for pianists’.
A big man, almost blind,

Art Tatum sat there on a stool,
addressing the piano,
two hands floating on the keys

(‘hardly touching,’ people said)
and not a trace of histrionics,
just the smile, convivial,

as if he were no more involved
than any other listener,
loving just the repertoire,

the Broadway / Tin Pan Alley stalwarts,
lyrics drifting in the air.
Whether or not the audience

had managed five grades with the nuns
or never hit a note,
the man’s arpeggios

would always leave them gasping —
not just the speed but all that
detail of articulation,

the heady soar of mathematics
threatening abandonment
but not, at last, the tonic.

Each two bar rest became
a sort of short sonata
hinting at a future

he’d finally abjure.
At times, to offer variation,
there’d be some counterpoint,

left hand glancing at the right,
right hand nodding back.
Behind it all was ‘Harlem Stride’,

Fats Waller, James P. Johnson,
the bar room and the barrelhouse
but that was just an inside joke,

a smile from time to time.
Who can say what technique ‘means’,
apart from all those scales + talent?

Of course, it is a miracle
but what is left to say
when all the options are supplied

in one man’s summary of hands?
Sometimes, they’d have him play with rhythm,
a back-up of guitar and drums,

even add a horn or two
but they could never be the point.
The orchestra was there already,

black and white, all eighty-eight.
‘That man plays way too much piano,’
the mother of a friend declared

and briskly left the room.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Marathon

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Peter Rose

Hard to believe perhaps, but Catullus
is not without magnanimity –
whatever people say. Nervy Quintius
sits up all night drafting an exquisite apology,
one demanding new feats of masochism.
Otherwise, Quintius is convinced,
Catullus will trash his latest eclogues
because of that historic faux pas of his:
the one Quintius has regretted for twenty years.
Young they both were, newly published,
with equal billing at the notorious gallery:
the voguish one will those suspect nudes.
Why, why, why, Quintius berates himself,
did he read for so long – an hour longer
than intended, someone rumoured:
leaving Catullus with less than a minute
(which he filled suavely, smilingly,
with a one-line poem). On and on it goes:
self-flagellation followed by recrimination.
Quintius’ guilt is torrential, and for once
he can’t blame anyone but himself.
What he doesn’t realise
is that there’s no need for these
orgasms of remorse. Catullus,
when he reads Quintius’ abject letter,
can’t even recall the occasion:
not the gallery, not the epic poems,
not the young man’s hubris,
not even the flagrant nudes on the wall.
Catullus had just fallen in love with Lesbia,
and he was beyond hearing, beyond insult.

(from The Catullan Rag)

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Early
 Morning
 Music


Posted on May 1, 2014 by Andrew Taylor

5.03

First
 scribble 
of 
birdsong

scrabbles 
the 
edges
 of 
sleep

it’s 
cold
 I 
hunch 
the 
sheet

higher 
over 
my 
shoulder

you
 sleep 
silent

and
 warm 
beside 
me



5.17

A 
double
 thump 
on 
our 
drive

the 
newspapers


cylinders 
of 
babble 
and 
shout

whisper
 nudge 
and 
lament

huddle
 under 
their 
flimsy 
covers

until
 that 
first 
coffee



5.29

Wide
 awake 
now

the
 good
 news 
the 
all
 clear

is
 like 
your 
warmth
 beside 
me

I
 want 
to 
shout 
it 
to 
the 
heavens

but
 who 
wants 
to 
see 
a 
silver 
haired 
man

barefoot
 and 
in 
a 
dressing 
gown

skipping
 down 
a 
still 
dark
 street

hollering 
his 
hallelujahs?
–

besides
 it’s 
raining



5.36

chip 
chip

chip
 chip 
a 
thin

chirp 
in 
our 
garden

chisels 
the 
darkness

a 
chink 
of
 first 
light 
creeps 
in

some 
insistent 
bird 
poking 
and 
scraping


shut
 up 
you 
idiot 
chiseller

you’ll 
wake 
the 
wattlebird



5.44

Oh 
no! 
here 
it 
comes


its
 first 
tentative 
notes

harmonious
 as 
a 
broken

crank shaft

now 
it 
goes
 hammer 
and
 tongs

whatever 
it 
might 
be
 expressing

splattered 
over 
the 
sunrise

the
 only 
way 
to
 stop 
it

to 
chop 
its 
tree 
down



6.03

I 
can 
sleep 
another 
hour

then
 I’ll 
hear 
you


stir 
turn 
and 
stare 
at 
the 
clock

the 
birds 
have 
gone 
silent

nudged 
out
 by 
a 
ground
 base

of
 traffic 
and 
sunlight
‐

time
 to 
make 
our 
own 
music


Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Coffee at the Palace of the Great Hoon

Posted on May 1, 2014 by John Tranter

hoon |huːn| Austral./NZ informal; noun: a lout or hooligan, especially a young man who drives
recklessly. the whole family was wiped out because some drunken hoon had to drive his car. ORIGIN
1930s: of unknown origin.

His beard tangled around his shanks as he descended
the rain-wet stairs, and from the garden a macaw called
In a red tongue. There were two of me, I was beside myself
As I helped untangle the Great Hoon’s beard.
‘Shall I speak?’ spake the Great Hoon. ‘Oh, I’m all ears,’
I replied. Spittle everywhere. Jewels here and there
Scattered on the gleaming stone, opals rained
On the glowing marble, and I thought I heard
Between the Parrot’s paragraphs of speech, a distant sea
Murmuring on a granulated strand, and thought I saw
Among the glittering foliage, in the mirror of myself,
The Gaudy Hoon made immeasurably strange.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

The House Went Quiet

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Jamie King-Holden

a nebula of flowers has self-abased,
its spent petals circle a jam jar,
their genus lost.

i’ve been instructed on the
benefaction of decay—
the merciless cues.

i read birthday letters with
my eyes closed and pack
postcards from Spain into
shoeboxes crypt-tight.

in the kitchen sink a blushing
cork locates north and a stale
paddock as empty as a punch line.

i wrap chipped plates in headlines,
let one break into alien continents,
its own atlas.

i enter a room with a made bed.
the ivory sheets remain an effigy
for buckled limbs and midnight cake.

outside, cars play their games.
the neighbour’s grey dog lets itself be known.
Summer carols on, indistinct.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Archaeology

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Zenobia Frost

1.
In a mythical demountable
we are students of the sword,

cotton-gloved rabbits,
a few aeons late
to taste the blade’s full thrust.

Creeping green curdles bronze,
suckles the edges off. It sleeps

in its labelled, cardboard
coffin – one eye open,
aching to callous palms,
aching for salt and bone.

Bronze molecules grit
their teeth at tender reverence:
millennia of students
who stroke away
the knife’s last trace of blood.

2.
I shaved my legs before I came over.

You noticed, and said
they were whitewashed pillars,
artful ruins beneath the lights.

Maybe you should buy dimmer bulbs;
I wouldn’t want to you to surmise
too much. I’m here to forget.

You shine your torch
and chisel and brush, and
chalk an X over certain parts.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Lesson

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Eileen Chong

‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.’
‘Wild Geese’, Mary Oliver

Over the empty distance between continents
we transmit facsimiles of affection. Your daughter,
the elder, has learnt to count. She can list the things
I have sent her: dresses, toy cats, a tent, picture books

about Australia. The younger has no words yet, but you tell me
she sometimes points to a photograph of Rob and myself.
I have seen her exactly twice. I do not yet know her smell,
the stretch and tangle of her limbs, her shifting weight in my arms.

My grief is also anger at death; at my inability to create,
sustain and free. Meanwhile, your girls grow: now they stand,
now they walk and talk. One day when we were alone I taught her
a new word: silver. She tried it on her tongue, the word taking shape.

Later, when we passed the sculpture, silver, of her own volition.
We could not now unlearn what we had carelessly, lovingly been taught.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Hunter-gatherers

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Broede Carmody

for Amber Beilharz

We wrestle bone-shapes from sand
too quick to crumble. The landscape heaves
and trembles at your touch. Air bruising from the
wet brush of our words.

I pry molluscs from shallow rock pools
and you liberate them
from their calcium-bodies with the lip of your knife.
Their soft underskin reminds me of kidneys:
innocent and eel-ugly.

Your red bucket with its chipped paint
becomes almost too heavy to hold.
The sun folds itself behind the sea and we make
our way home like old philosophers driving in the dark.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Palm—Reading

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Autumn Royal

After Louise Cotton’s Palmistry and Its Practical Uses

My reason curls around—possibility—the practice
of cheirosophy—the prediction of character as demarcated by the hand—

each line & mark—sparks a meaning that deepens
as the reader traces the heart line towards—Jupiter’s etching.

There is a game I used to play—my pale hands
clasped in fists—held heavy by my thighs—see if you can meddle them apart—

I’m masking a gleaming wonder—light bleeding between
the spaces of my spindly fingers—breaths dampen as the knuckles

whiten & the fingertips tingle—numb.

I am going to play this game again—rereading
myself against the yellowed pages of my Mother’s palmistry book—my hands

spread wide—exposing the left palm—moist with memories—
a long Apollo finger denotes an appreciation of beauty & a tendency to bend

the truth. My hands are always on the edge—
of conversations—their hushed syllables morph into snarls—hanging for a cliff

to grip—fortunes aside—the lines of a hand
reveal traces of a more cutting explanation—when Death knocks—a person

covers their thumbs—inside the fingers & palm.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Linen Closet

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Ray Briggs

The two men snarl across the sheets, a Babel tangle.
He runs his tongue along the weird word of his body.
He wraps his skin in moans behind a stack of towels,
forgets his name, digs down to where delight is buried.

Later, he’ll bring the borax, brillo, bleach. He’ll scrub
the sense back into language. Him and her. And it—
inanimate. No sweat, no stains. He’ll stick the bubbles
back in his mouth. The monogram will speak the truth.

What of his lover? Steamed away. And who can prove
his limbs were more than rumors, his whispers more more than vapor?
A magic trick: you wrap him in a pillowcase
and tap your wand. Abracadabra rabbit rapture.

Midnight. He cleans his mouth with whisky. He can’t sleep.
He takes another shower. The house is full of soap.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Suggestions for Lady Macbeth

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Chloe Wilson

Try vinegar. Our grandmothers trusted
its knack for stripping back
organic matter. Try bicarbonate of soda,
try lemon, try tepid water spiked
with alka seltzer. Work before the fizz
dissipates. No success? If the affected area
resembles a spilt cabernet, dunk it whole
in semillon – those most alike know best
how to dissolve one another. Still no luck? Go
to the cupboard under the sink, try sugar soap,
hydrogen peroxide, anything with a caution,
an exclamation mark, crossbones in a diamond.
Should any telltale trace remain, light a flame
under the hotplate. When the smoke
begins to rise, stretch your fingers out
like a concert pianist – then come, come,
come, come, come – give me your hand.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Biography of Elvis

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Claire Nashar

(after Mark Leidner)

They say Elvis could shoot a hoop from twelve metres out.
They say it was because he was missing a tiny bone
in each of his wrists.
They say that when he sweated the inside of his clothes
became gilded, and if they happened to already be gilded, became
like rainbows or supernovae.
They say that Elvis had a way with birds.
They say that this explains the mob of ornithologists that tried
to kill him in Georgia.
They say that once, after observing the flight of a group of grey
pigeons, Elvis predicted the rise and fall of the Spice Girls.
They say that if you listen to Blue Suede Shoes backwards, that’s
what it says.
They say that when Elvis was a child he often saw the ghost of a dog
that had been shot in the head.
They say that when he was older he drank dom peringon just to
forget it.
They say that he once lived in Alaska, in a spare log cabin with a
potbelly stove, and watched movies about pilgrims on
the television sets which he collected to people his
home with presidents and game show hosts.
They say that he once visited Sydney, Australia, but I’m not sure
I believe that one.
They say that Elvis never told a lie.
They say that he married for love.
They say that when his heart broke for the first time he created a dance move
so sad that it would break all other hearts forever, but that it made
him so afraid that he died without ever showing it to anyone.
They say that Elvis was a born a Leo, but that in end
it didn’t matter.
They say that if he had been born an insect he
would have made a great bumble bee.
They say that if Elvis had been born a fruit-bearing tree
he would have been a Santa Rosa plum.
They say that if Elvis had never been born at all, Michael Jackson
would have been forced to invent him out of plasticine
and chux wipes and to breathe the breath of life
into his puny open mouth.
All in all, they say that Elvis was sometimes a very sad man.
They say that after Michael Jackson brought him to life
Elvis cried and cried and cried.
They say that to this day, he has not moved in a very
long time.
They say he had a twin brother who died at birth
in a shack in Mississippi, about that one
the biographers tend to agree.
They say that whenever he checked out of a hotel
he would write the cleaners of that hotel a heartfelt
message on the special hotel stationary and sign it
with a flourish of the special hotel pen, which afterwards
he would sometimes, but always absentmindedly,
put in his pocket.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Meridian

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Aden Rolfe

Catalogue everything in the garden
by outlook and trope. Both daylight and
shoulders can be broad

remember, but are leaves defined by veins
or diameter? How many stones have been
unturned? And what things are not, apart from
holes and shade?

If my eye connects points in space
we know it’s the vector that defines
where we are
and where to from here.

Walk the garden again, it says. Think your way
toward the moment. Beneath the grass:
a dynamic play of boundary and shape.

Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Cantone 5a. ‘Core’

Posted on May 1, 2014 by A J Carruthers
music book
for the study
of voice, piano
& choral word chor
a Dickinson Family
Library copy.
EDR 469. copy mss
Houghton Library.
Harvard University
(Cambridge, MS). —

Pianoforte; Renaissance
revival square piano;
floral and scroll carved
legs and apron. Hallet,
dooms Davis & Co., Boston, as it
redeems
Massachusetts; c.1845.
Brazilian rosewood,
Brazilian rosewood
veneer, spruce, ivory,
iron; height 93.9 cm.,
width 207.0 cm.,
depth 99.0 cm.

E. Dickinson
received this
piano from her
father in 1845,
when she was
fourteen.

Piano stool; pedestal-
based with hexagonal
seat upholstered in
plush; hexagonal
pedestal flares to ring
and base with three ball
and ring feet; screw
mechanism for raising
and lowering seat.

unknown

American
maker;
circa 1845.

Brazilian rosewood,
Brazilian rosewood
veneer, upholstery;
height 49.5 cm.,
diameter 35.5 cm.

This stool most
likely was acquir-
ed by Ed. Dickinson
when he purchas-
ed the pianoforte
for his daughter
Emily in 1845.

a bottle of otto
of rose to go
with it, a sheet
of music, a china
mug with Forget
me not upon it
from S. S.,—
Herself and not her
music was what we
seemed to love

One of the make sweet
mortal musics music.
Jupiter denies Pussy
I stop the birds to listen. goes
These behaviours down
of the year hurt there
almost like music, too,
shifting when
it ease us most.

these core
materials
this mooSic

H. Vendler: ‘The
FAScinat-ing
CHILL that
MUsic LEAVES.’
‘The FAScinAting Anton
CHILL that Rubinstein
MUsic LEAVES.’ eared h

but not to
our Creator —
earthly estrangement
worlds Core. —

Chorus: My raft is by the shoreshe's
shoreshe’s
how? read s

light and free

timid &
tumultuous
germ soul

cRealt or I
and now am
I have very
a pia happy
issi played
m o & sang

him hymn Father Father psalm

I want a Piano
I want all together.
I prefer Rosewood
3 pedals—and a
stool. Stun with
Bolts of melODE!
study time in
lyric (choral) time

could our we might
thoughts be in fact shatter
pitched as time with
the lyric’s, the deter
mined voice of our
musings

To Susan Gilbert, 1853:
‘Dear Susie – I send
you a little air – The
‘Music of the Spheres’

The ear
is the
last face.

E. Dickinson
included in
this lettre
a sketch
ascending
musical
notations (scales)
and puffs of
ascending clouds.

This then is a book.
And there are more
of them. Why is
any other book needed?
and the open leaf
of the book makes
the tears come

We hear
after we see,
which to tell
you first is still
my destiny.

open me carefully

Put up my lute!
Lines lyres
sole line

y M sic

Notes to Cantone 5a.

  1. The Dickinson Cantone. Sharon Cameron, in the remarkable book Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (1979) writes that the contradiction of lyric speech arises from a new reality emergent in distinct as well as collective (harmonised) voices: ‘At the center of the contradiction rises the lyric’s choral voice, however disguised under the cloak of a customary first-person speaker’ (207).
  2. Private lyric (accomp. lyre) in contrast to public choral odes (kithara), but both may be deployed as lyric, broadly defined. Dickinson as a choral poet, a social poet in recluse. No ‘pure’ poem.
  3. Dickinson’s piano. Cantone takes interest in a bound volume of Dickinson’s miscellaneous sheet music. Books: Carolyn Lindley Cooley, The Music of Emily Dickinson’s Poems and Letters: A Study of Imagery and Form (2003). Notation letter to S. Gilbert featured on the 1990 cover of Judy Jo Small’s Positive as Sound: Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme. 3 registers.
– .
Posted in 61: NO THEME III | Tagged

Review Short: Beyond the Ohlala Mountains: Alan Brunton, Poems 1968-2002

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Pam Brown

Beyond the Ohlala Mountains

Beyond the Ohlala Mountains: Alan Brunton, Poems 1968 – 2002
edited by Martin Edmond and Michele Leggott
Titus Books, 2014

The mask on the cover of ‘Beyond the Ohlala Mountains’ suggests that there’ll be some odd theatrics inside the book. It’s a plain papier-mâché mask of a slightly jowly head with a bulbous nose and a pair of puckered, pouting, full red lips. What does it express – is it a superior sneer? Is it bourgeois disdain? Is it about to say ‘oh là là’? The mask was made by Sally Rodwell, the now-deceased partner of the New Zealand poet collected here, Alan Brunton. It was made for a theatre work called Cabaret of the Unlikely that was performed three years after Brunton had died at 55, in 2002.

Continue reading →

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , ,

Review Short: Valerie Volk’s Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Tamryn Bennett

Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales

Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales by Valerie Volk
Wakefield Press, 2013

What are their stories?
what compulsions bring them here,
to this small village in the valley
beneath its towering mountains? (21)

Invoking Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in structure and with a ‘motley crew’ of pilgrims, Volk’s Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales assembles a cross-section of modern society cloaked in secrecy and scepticism. Where Chaucer’s travellers are drawn together by a story-telling competition, Volk’s pilgrims are united by a four-day bus tour to the German town of Oberammergau for the ritual of the Passion Play. Continue reading →

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Notes from Mandalay, Burma

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Jennifer Mackenzie

Jennifer Mackenzie visited Mandalay, the second largest city in Burma, and its last royal capital, to attend the second Irrawaddy Literary Festival, where she was a featured poet.

Thursday 13 February 2014

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.

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Sally Evans Reviews David Prater

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Sally Evans

Leaves of Glass

Leaves of Glass by David Prater
Puncher & Wattmann, 2013

David Prater’s latest collection Leaves of Glass is based on three years’ correspondence in the late nineteenth century between young Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd and the ageing master Walt Whitman. The epistolary material between these two men, a collection of twenty or so letters currently archived at the State Library of Victoria, forms the skeleton for this collection. Prater deftly plays with these two personae, offering a kaleidoscopic vision of their relationship alongside a number of poems that experiment with the ambiguities of written language and the shifting levels of intimacy revealed by the O’Dowd–Whitman letters. Continue reading →

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: October

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Nadia Bailey

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 resonance, all achieved through her judicious word and image selection. Over the centuries, the moon has appeared countless times in poems, but Nadia Bailey’s portrayal of it seems fresh and unique. The phrase ‘A harlot moon’ immediately sets the tone of the poem and diffuses any clichéd notions. It alerts the reader that this is no ordinary night and the moon becomes a portent of loss, and an indicator that strange things are afoot. The red moon, the yowling cat, the clouds of ash ‘occulting the moon’ all suggest black magic, picked up beautifully in Miles to go// and no rapture in sight — the reference to Frost’s, ‘Miles to go before I sleep’ is a charming touch in the poem. The cat’s synesthetic ‘dull scream/ swaying like a thurible’ adds much to the poem, cleverly suggesting smoke, ritual and the inversion of normality.

The poem is dramatic, but not melodramatic; the poem’s brevity and intensity are a direct result of the sonnet form. The enjambment creates a sense of urgency, the running lines mimetic of fire. I also like the inversion of scale. The city with its ‘seashell resonance’ seems an ineffectual whisper against the cat’s ‘long yowl’, and the moon, ‘shrugged from the shoulder of Orion’ gains mythic proportions. Yet by the end of the poem, we know it is the fire which is the genesis of all these strange happenings. The ending phrase, ‘ash clouds occulting the moon’ delivers enormous emotional and symbolic power. All in all, a finely crafted and rewarding poem. – JB

October


A harlot moon: the fires
burning in the west turn the light

bloody before night takes its lease
of the sky. A red moon, shrugged

from the shoulder of Orion, rises
to the seashell resonance of the city and

the night is thick with dust and sweet-mouthed
promises, baby, it will be over soon.

A long yowl cuts the heat, incoherent or
spoken in tongues – a cat, fighting

for its piece of the world, dull scream
swaying like a thurible. Miles to go

and no rapture in sight, just the slow
ash clouds occulting the moon.
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Review Short: Jill Jones’s The Beautiful Anxiety

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Jo Langdon

The Beautiful Anxiety

The Beautiful Anxiety by Jill Jones
Puncher & Wattmann, 2013

Frank O’Hara has a poem unambiguously and humorously titled ‘You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming’. As pastiche or homage – even incidentally – the first two poems from the six-part sequence that opens Jill Jones’s stunning new collection The Beautiful Anxiety are titled: ‘1. Hold On’, and ‘2. I’m Coming’ (‘My Ruined Lyrics’). The present continuous tense of the verb ‘to come’ is thematically apt everywhere in this collection. Not only are poems throughout The Beautiful Anxiety sensual and frequented by moments of desire or quiet ecstasy, they are constantly ‘coming’ in the sense that they are arriving.

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Review Short: Tony Lintermans’s Weather Walks In

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Jeremy Fisher

Weather Walks In

Weather Walks In by Tony Lintermans
Hybrid Publishers, 2013

I think of plainsong when I read Lintermans’s poems, of cadences unadorned by instrumentation but satisfying in their sound and rhythm. They are by no means Gregorian chants, but they still offer the calmness and sonority of such songs. This peacefulness begins with the physical appearance of the book. A yellow cover with blue type: the typeface like a manual typewriter. Apostrophes are rain drops. It’s a simple but effective design. Inside, the poems are laid out equally as simply and effectively. Continue reading →

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