Past melts the present.
The earliest weapons were hands, nails, teeth.
A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation.
Bioluminescent gardens.
Wailing migration from life to death.
Railroads, birds, bison.
Memories lost, yet irrevocably found.
Can there be revelation in this?
Nothing is sudden.
All movement arrives in cataclysm.
Freight yards, waterfront silos, sugar refineries,
distilleries, the smell of malt.
In ancestor times hills cried creeks,
pines jammed into species, pierced cielo.
The two cities spoke in season colour,
colour behind eyelid colour, ebony bay
scratched with lights.
Despite their buildings’ calcified retinas,
despite the torrents del concreto buckling with refuse,
today the sea spins the same line:
suck my fat sun, gobbling down celestial.
Either one could’ve fallen into treble; one
did. Today,
who packs one
thousand minutes into a beat?
Metal nerves scuff rooftops, singing
if I was
your
girl
friend funk / twitch, church
bells.
Matter’s
either-or potential steams
through nebulous concave…
through capital dreams…
of birds on her coat munching
digital food / malling.
Scraping up
dead mutt in early morning mist,
streets cleaned with tourist. I’m
running late for coffee.
Whose nervous doorbells are chanting?
Whose skeletal pines are fishing
from holes in Patagonia?
Either one of us could have fallen into treble:
the world’s a calloused doorbell / oyster. Discarded pop
becomes us. You wouldn’t even think.
Entre el paisaje y el atardecer: ocean.
Between the Pacific and el paisaje: pensamiento.
Spumes of our forest, dribbles of dirty Sydney creek:
1) the Earth shudders in a dry, cauterised light
2) a small painting acquires carbon chains, vomits
fiery rosa into a dappled
blue-hued cloud of sperm.
The sea keeps dancing on the beach.
In ancestor times gleaming
nails went mollusc
and dashed hot paints
from the frames of their concrete chrysalises.
When the lights came on, some necks had necklaces.
A poem of balconies; let your golden locks tumble
into our steaming bass.
our whole world is a third world,
a step-sister left behind in the galaxy’s
cinderella story.
ugly cousin earth spinning on her heel,
raging at the cosmos’ beauty.
defective pieces of swept-up stardust
from factories that abuse labouring angels, we
offal from a flourishing inter-galactic trade, we
who want nothing more than to be saved
and nothing saved but us.
our unwatched backs, our shaken wombs, we
like all rejects, spill mother’s secrets
to anyone who listens.
anyone holding out his arms,
anyone who promises toffee and lies
about how nice we look.
mesmerized by their metal and muscle, we
ask strangers to swing an axe
into the sun’s gut.
we watch.
at night, we whisper to each other – we
were not made weak and small for nothing, we
can slide into mother’s cracked skin and hide
inside her burn-red belly until it’s over, we
are fated to drink the sap in her marrow, we
can grow a tangle of nerves and veins until
each one is inside each one
and no one can live without killing
and no one can kill without dying.
thus, we can survive.
flowers in armpits, we fantasize
about another galaxy.
no factories, no fence-sitting angels
with halos of barbed wire.
no greater muscle than ours.
we pour yellow and black and red earth
on our eyes until the dream is solid
as earth’s bones.
we cry for this place,
tucked behind the knees of the galaxy,
gurgling in the crook of the sun’s elbow,
a place scorched clean. in her sleep
our planet grinds her teeth.
As we fought for the third day, about
something I no longer recall, your voice
turned to water, to a sound I had
never heard, wet and hard and
cold, water from the bursting gut
of a cloud, water from where the air is thin
and icy. I remember your body, laid on the sheets
scented and warm, like a loaf cooling in my hands,
and how at that moment I bent to taste the stew
and how its breath caressed my stunned cheek
like the breath from your body, your mouth:
how I had slowly discovered you
your breasts, your stomach, your thighs,
lying in my bed, night after night
until your disparate continents
joined suddenly into an earth. And so
in that heated kitchen I cooked and pushed out
further and further, rising from the warm surface of the earth
into the chill grain of a sepia world thick
with clouds, rising unheeding until the kitchen became
obscure and I could no longer see
your eyes, your cheeks, your long silver hair, I heard only
the sound of your voice cleaving, turning to black
water. And in that warm kitchen, on the third day
you made yourself into an earth
I could no longer know.
I won pool today
with the ferocity
of a dolphin
devouring
minnows
I won pool today
in a place called
Lake Ferry
on the edge of
the world
against a wide lake
with a grey
gravel shore
and a beach ridge
of tiny stones
too dangerous
to swim off
the pool table
was in the tavern
that looked
over the sea
I ate fish in a
hamburger bun
so white
and fall-apart
I thought it would
melt into my hands
and I drank
black beer
with a kiwi bird logo
on the side
of the barrel
I won pool in a bar
where the music
was all 80s hits
and the patrons
were old fisherman
wandered in
from shacks
along the road
and where
there was just one
table of tourists
sampling a
bottle of wine
from the region
I shot those balls
like a dolphin
gulping minnows
underneath a silver
swinging drop light
the taste of sea water
in my mouth
light beams
dancing on the
green surface
as the jukebox played
its own choices
and outside in the sun
my skin burned
Yet once more, in commodity crops, again in
aster yellows, with merits in stacked resistance,
I scramble for feed coverage
and demand the forward position.
It is important to reduce shattering before late crop
reports filter in. Bitter constraint is the face
of a challenging feed-price landscape.
I still have a fascination with teeth. Prime
Liberty knows what it’s like to play that
role. Who would not sing: there will be waste.
He marvels at the terminal design.
He must not float his own silage
out-yielded, weltered to the parching wind;
he has a critical need for shade.
Begin thin trade in sacred seed
wild relatives are preserved.
Begin and control unwanted volunteers,
foreign investors: you can’t put a face
to them. Some gentle men
would do what they had always
done. We create value.
And bid fair price in the sow stall barn.
For we nurst upon soft skills
fed the same stock the same birthing malformations.
Other specifications were difficult to meet.
Under the open embryos of the morn,
we drove a field by treating cells,
time has made crude imports difficult,
Battening on slow glass. Get metal in fresh due.
Take root, no need for a wet kit.
Toward harvest, you want them flush and cycling.
A place where people live
for their neighbors
tempered by the body condition score,
yet many investors would rather put their money
in the food chain. Absent are those who lamb about.
Growers have Heart, Valtera, Authority,
and Authority Charge. The crow benefit is gone
an innovation laggard to never return.
Safety and security
are watchwords, new sprouting tolerances
rolling the soil.
Wild speculation likely
is harmful. No more seen.
Flighting wear. The joy of feed efficiency laves
from annex to railcar, killing as the grain appeals.
Enlist technology. Graze the herd
the bale itself. The science supports
preconditioning, when the white thorn blows.
‘Excellence through stewardship’ on everyone’s ear.
Filling gravity boxes with remorseless depth.
At the dawn of a seasonal
softening in lean
hog. Unprecedented seed depth accuracy
in challenging terrain, over ridge
tops and through water streams.
Ay me, I fondly dream
of ‘genuity and design’ — for what could that have done
they already have orders
in canola singulation, her enchanting son.
What lament? Do keep in mind, we are trained
to kill animals. That made the hideous roar.
Cropping practices are the main
twin row market. They are essentially a pair
of genetic scissors. We call it editing,
with uncessant care. To commercialise technologies
for the shepherds trade, and strictly meditate the market.
Terminal seed. It is only natural.
The sport of augury in the afternoon shade
of shotgun sequencing. Beef has a future.
Faith is the spur that clears land rights
(That last infirmity of Noble mind).
Shoot, shovel and shut up. Live laborious.
An even hundred weight we hoped to find
the residual hide in sudden blaze,
physical signs of torsion with the abhorred shears,
he slits the thin spun life. But not the pagewire,
lambs steady, touch a fertile body;
no plants will grow on mortal soil,
where biotech traits are not permitted.
We triple the carrying capacity in broad rumoured lies,
it spreads aloft: ‘the picture they have conceived.’
Perfect witness of all intents
as he pronounces last each dead,
so much wheat in Heaven; expect my yield.
O Fountain flush Brahmin, the honoured flood
Smooth-sliding in recipients, crowned with our needs.
The strain herd was a progeny difference,
a proving ground,
listen to the herald of Talens
that came with price discovery.
He asks the wind, the clear field production system.
Hard call brought about by a loss in swine
weight, a specious gift
on fertile ground, each tusked propulsion
they are not of his story.
They confirm their buying position, their answer brings
a viral structure in a coat of proteins, strayed.
The capsid was calm, and on the level
sleek serotype with all her sisters played.
That fatal and perfidious maul
eclipsed the uniform coverage, and rigged the contortions
that sunk so low that sacred heart of lamb.
The Five Freedoms went footing slow in
packing houses and term chambers,
inwrought with din figures, and on the edge
that blood pudding inscribed with deference.
Going equipped to the dearest pledge.
Cost came, and last did go
in accelerated breeding techniques The
masses he bore of animals twain (The
hide opes, the iron shunts amain), he
shakes his mitered locks.
How could I have spared? The
outlook for hungry millions
remains precarious and climbs into the fold.
A community that loves harte
arbeit scrambles for the feast
the blind mouths we transvalue. We know how to hold
a sheep-hook, or have learned the slit at least
the faithful technician’s art belongs.
What rents them? What need they? They are sped
and when they list, their lean and flashy jaws
grate on pintle-style latches, wretched chute.
The hungry look up, and are not fed
swollen with wind; the rank draw
rot inward, and foul contagion spreads.
Devouring the space of nothing said.
But that two-handed axe at the door
stars ready to strike, the exotic known.
Fresh lap of blood on the dog day looks
like it might cover the drought
losses, the capper to all this is honied showers.
Seed shallow for ground cover
the bloom that forsaken dies.
The wild hyacinth
of weekly slaughter flecked
through futures bright.
All the passions of the chambered shed
revving
towards a little ease;
combustion is true dawn.
Wash far away, where bodies hurled
able danger of the world.
Savings are magnified in vows denied,
he slept through the fable of the land’s end
where the great visions of control
look toward hayland and the wheatbelt’s hold;
the injunction is denial now, and melts with feed additives
we have given the hapless, youth.
Plumes in the forelimb of the morning sky:
the cut sunk low, but mounted high,
Once more they walked the wavering
hill where others grow; day streams along
they hear the bleating nuptial
in the market of no retreat.
Herd in solemn troop, their glory moves
the beta agonists from his report.
We discuss red atrophy no more;
large recompense, and shalt be good
to all that wander in the chain of food.
The uncouth sing of stream and gills
while the stillborn morning went out with gray.
He touched the stalk of pedigree seed
and with eager thought proclaimed, the past
oral now; the treatment had stretched to all the hills
and was dropt into the western way.
At last he rose, twitching, as the spray blew
towards fresh lands, and pastures new.
The Western Producer, is a Canadian weekly newspaper, traditionally read on agricultural and livestock farms. It has recently become a dominant mouthpiece for Monsanto, pro-GM crop lobbies and the like. This rewriting of
‘Lycidas’ has taken its lexis entirely from the Dec.- March 2013 editions of the paper.
For Isabelle Li
Your sadness is a continent, she said;
you are the frozen north.
In winter, where I was a child, the soil turned to stone. The wind crept
Over it like old news from the Steppe
and wept; the underworld was the whole world then
And the only word it knew was grief. If my sadness is chthonic, I think; if
It’s ten feet deep and chronic, it must be yours,
or it might be the world’s,
and some of the news is good:
For summer’s here, and the world is warming, and
the days to come may be the (un)making of us yet.
I tuck and put your hands into my clean fresh cut
a short bob falling just above the bottom of my ears
roughly pushed back at the sides with two
parallel cropped braids emerging from
just below the slightly diagonal edge of the bob
in the back—
there are two bulbous globs of dyed-
auburn hair rolling into a bouncy nest on each
of my shoulders lying over loose wide rolls
and some
salt and pepper curls cresting to my front and
catching in each armpit, sussing out a simple
lay within the wavy layers of blonde hair piled up
on the tops of my arms and hanging
onto my elbows—
on the right side of my face a slick finely combed-
through fan is tightly pulled back from just beneath
my temple to a point above and behind my ear
next to a puff of tight silver and brown curls
sticking out from the side of my head, long
straight dirty blonde strands float out
over and from within the bob undulating
in a constant draft above my shoulder, a large
softly swept back hump of downy frizz sits
on the left top of my head next to scruffy bleached
tufts of hair standing up off-center, snaking
and curving by their own weight
back onto themselves—
jagged bangs parted in the middle sit below my
eyebrows between a curved polygon ending in a
gently upturned wisp laying over my right eye
and cheek and a face length ribbon
high above my left cheekbone angled against
and through the hair on the left side of my head—
on the right side my face
over a large bunch of fine black hair brushing
my cheek and burying my ear a soft sheet
of brunette hair falls from my temple to the side
of my mouth bending out towards
the space to my side in a parabola and flaring
under my chin and a few strands entangle
on my wet lip—
a gentle part in the left side of the back of my head
splits into a series of elongating s-shapes
autonomously braiding at the tail ends as they
bounce and sashay and a single shining wave
curling into itself as it meets the outer back ridge
of my left ear—
a loose braid curves horizontally
around the top of my head
its end disappearing
into piled ringlets on the sides of a vertical bundle
of hair at my crown next to an elegant pyramid
of four rough knots
drooping onto each other—
three leopard spots are dyed into an irregularly
shaped and closely shaven patch around a frail
white cowlick at the edge of my hair whorl
a wet dark chocolate hill with red highlighting
begins from the edge of my forehead and rolls
sleekly to the center of my right eyebrow blending
at one edge into a springy short blonde coil
on the left side of a natural part
split by a gently fixed turtleshell barrette
and two bobby pins—
[ . . . ] holding hands.
[ . . . ].
I put on a soft cotton blouse.
I put on a soft cotton blouse, light blue
and lift the collar gently
and touch the round plastic buttons. Perhaps
no issue is more vexed
than the small linen jacket
that slides over my arms—yesterday
I cut my hair
into a bob—
the ends fall to the bottom
of my ears. I tuck my hair
behind my ears, one at a time, and smile.
Working the depthless predicate unringed, the sun
and the earthen mirror—in a fit of coldness
I clutch my left hip—and pelvis
ridge with a thumb
around front, lying a made loose fist, in-
turned on my sternum: then twist
left eyeing the parallel ribbon above my shoulder—
a night cold apple is resting against my
cheek—
white and blue—
I collapse
my left hand over the side of my chin, take onto
the knuckles of my right hand my left elbow
and gently support my bemused head—I have
a beading wet orange jammed firmly
between my forearm and bicep—
iridescent oils, moving pink
dirt, orange pores, all blue—
after I splay down and backwards the entire body
of my left arm, and cup
the side of my neck
with my right hand I lean my chest forward
against my pelvis thrust back, I keep my head
straight—and I am wearing
thick speckled dove lensless glasses—and I possess
a warming royal gala
upright on my elbow, my right
one—
visually impassable—
I punch without force each section alone
of my right arm down and my right hand deep
into the pocket of my straight pant
and turn, slightly,
leaning into it and put my spreading left hand
flat along the left of my face, over my ear—I am
happily surprised—a clean
but steadily blackening banana
is hooked around my right wrist—
against my thigh—
like a purple crystal under foam—
I turn both my hands inward and let them
onto my stomach, with my wrists pushed out
and my elbows angled forward and I have
an s-shape—I am looking
with warmth and a faint gleefulness
of love—and with my head at a tilt
a bartlett pear is reclining
into the nook of my right collar bone—
so richly indistinguishable
from the surroundings it is
a hole—nothing
forever—I relax
my hand onto my side and look up and over
and am curling way back, impossibly throughout
but pushing my head and neck forward such that
a mauve plum
on a spilling bundle of white grapes
is just not rolling off of the center of my stomach—
mauve
though I cannot
see this, full dull and arcing
invisible, netted
ringing
one of the axes:
what consists of the cold gel
fixed on many surfaces?—the action of the watery
mechanism aerosolizes
with all of that clothing and spews it
six hands from the center of a shallow curve,
relaying, for instance,
tumbling sentient cardigans whose fasteners
are gold buttons
and into whose surfaces are etched anchors
wound by rope aerosolizing with weak dye
released into the air—
hold on to your fingers
righteous light
here then not
a place redoubt redoubled
which shoes
bombs mixing down
grew up quickly
death dream leaves blood
powdery dribble lingers
these shoes
I tread where the mangroves end
in a high tide of red fiddler crabs—
machined claws, slow primordial heads
like sidestepping stones
wet-cemented in ooze.
From their tatty jaws, new planets
mass and tumble like pearls,
empires of new sand moons
forged in the ebb
where barbarians raise their hostile claws.
These coral relics, this foraged rot
are home, or half-home—
we falter, we twostep on the annihilating tide
where each fringe colony
flares and dies, flares and dies,
And breadfruits and ragged palms
whip as if they might lift off
to find an older idea of a shore;
metal beach shacks cling, cling
like limpets armoured in tin.
Now the idiot Pacific rolls its tongue—
here the razing of culture is ritual,
each anthill perfect and perfectly erasable,
perched where the black backwater
will smash overhead and bury it all.
I.
Three days, and I’m already
craving sparkling water, each afternoon:
sprüdeln,
how it fizzes in the mouth.
This city will not let me. I stand
at the wrong end of queues and think:
widerstand, resist, to stand against.
This is a toolbox language.
In this bar,
you can buy the stool you sit on.
A woman on the train
hands me the word Pfingsrosen,
plucked from her backyard.
I love how it unfurls,
its increments.
II.
I think you should play the piccolo,
it’s not hard, just
two notes. Scheiße. Understanding love,
the love of hunger, is nothing.
Mum wanted to abort me,
she told me at my twenty-first.
Autumning, to blue,
I am moonswept and mouthy,
I even laugh at my boss’s jokes.
Make the poems squeal –
I’m making your fucking tea,
I’m gonna let that puppy steep.
Almost never pink, there’s a Finnish word
that means comma fucker
not looking for someone is a vexatious venture.
You can’t tell me no-one’s ever
put a baby in bath in Berlin before.
This one isn’t mine.
Summer flays the valley,
the skinless blue of a sky with no air,
only distance, a vacuum in sharp focus.
Birds ignorant of the physics of flight
hang in the rawness, waiting for gravity to notice.
Sounds are magnified; their waves roar
along the length of the valley’s funnel,
a keen of pain or grief, I can’t tell.
The heat holds us with an invisible presence,
a paradox we can’t compute
as we gaze into this enamel void.
Then finally the waterfall
like the right answer.
A stone family of serious Olmec heads
piled on each others’ shoulders
as uncanny as Antarctic life.
The water finds its path
leaping brow to nose to chin,
gifting itself to the ground.
We lie in the pool, heat clinging to fine hairs
in tiny, desperate bubbles,
our breath heavy with the smell of green.
Staring upward, specks and filaments float
across hard aqueous blue.
I am a scientific god,
peering at the sky through the lens
of a divine microscope.
The pool shines as if the sky
had scraped against the valley’s bones,
the falls roar in place,
the laced fingers of trees stop it all
from sliding out of the frame, holding
this generosity of water
dislocated from its path to the sea,
reminding us that without
these jumbled threads of vintage rain,
the waterfall is nothing
but a thirsty cliff.
As I pick it up I recall the creature’s daily clicking
and strange penchant for Astroturf, for the small island
of bright green plastic pointers sailing on concrete slab like a raft,
religious above the sea of dying green in my backyard.
I fancy how this exoskeleton might be placed
to rest in the Garden Of Death; the shrine that grows
from dead trees, beads and other offerings
in your once cold and empty concrete courtyard.
Despite all good intents it ends up on my porch,
green body boldly laid out on a pew of firewood,
among a somewhat conscious and deliberate arrangement
of kettles, bells and other collected or discarded whistles.
God, or the equivalent, I ponder, has strange journeys for us all.
– after Emily Dickinson
There’s nothing to shatter
on this evening. The window
is open, the neighbours may look.
With my mouth held shut
I fill the saucepan. Black marks,
once boiled-over, flake into the water.
I dwell in possibility,
nothing rarely happens unless
it’s passed through the lips.
My body faces the stove,
the saucepan rests over flame,
I want to boil down my thoughts
having sliced them with a knife,
bluntly. I hold my hands over
the aluminum mouth, allowing time
for each line to sink in. The water bubbles,
steam pushes my palms up, warm
and wet to wipe over my cheeks.
And Soon There’s a Density to Things …
Double Glaze by Steve Brock
5 Islands Press, 2013
In his most recent collection, Double Glaze, Steve Brock moves the orderly reader from the very public realm of ‘Work’, via ‘The Commute’, to dwell with ‘Writing’ and finally to settle in, arguably the most intimate of registers, ‘Family’. Although poetic work rarely arrives in convenient clusters, a poet’s choice in manuscript arrangement is not arbitrary; it intimates the conceptual webbing informing the collection’s central aesthetic, thematic, and in this case, socio-political, preoccupations.
Daniel Yammacoona by Damian Balassone
Ginninderra Press, 2013
The first three poems in Damian Balassone’s Daniel Yammacoona are about women who have been left by men. In each case the man appears to be the hero of the story, yet the woman is not necessarily unheroic; in at least two of the poems the heroism is one of steadfastness. Continue reading
Beside Rivers by Susan Adams
Island Press, 2013
The poems in Susan Adams’s Beside Rivers are arranged in three sections: Awash, A Wonder, and Wander By Water. The cover blurb states ‘Susan Adams’s first book shines with imagery and clear eyed veracity …’; although many poems do shine, I’m not convinced that I found the ‘clear eyed veracity’ worked as well as the blurb suggested, nor that the imagery was always as successful as the poet intended.
Cordite 45: SILENCE is guest edited by Jan Owen
Silence as a theme could be interpreted, explored and challenged in innumerable ways. It might seem quietly paradoxical to even think of writing about absence of sound and language, but then we communicate with silence as our measure and matrix, especially in music and poetry. It’s a mysterious concept: I think of the silence of Tao, of Pascal’s eternal silence of infinite space. And what is the actuality of it to the profoundly deaf, to the one in solitary confinement, to the bereaved or oppressed?
It could be especially fruitful to deal with the concept in the plural: the many silences in our lives – intimate, hostile, enforced, questioning, fearful – and how they are coloured and understood by the before and after. How do we sense the qualities and degrees of various silences and quiet times, their shapes and textures? How do we experience inner silence in meditation or reverie, the relief of quiet after chaos, the knife-edge of silence that is suspense or dread? We are aware of the power of silence in speech and poetry; of timing as the essence of humour and drama, of the pause of the line break, ‘the beauty of innuendos’, the full stop in the text and in life – the finality of Hamlet’s last word. I like Roethke’s wish that his silences be more precise, and Mallarmé’s dream of a ‘silent white poetry.’ Yeats’s lines (slightly adapted) might spur you on: ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/ the mind moves upon silence.’
But please, no blank white sheets!
Submit up to three poems … but first, please read the submission guidelines.
‘Yoked with contrarieties…’
Boom by Liam Ferney
Grand Parade Poets, 2013
the Book of Ethel
Puncher & Wattmann, 2013
Jordie Albiston’s the Book of Ethel and Liam Ferney’s Boom illustrate two dramatic obverses in contemporary Australian poetry. Both are cleverly crafted; both have levels of subtlety and manifest strength; both are linguistically sinuous and inventive, taking liberties with conventional style and syntax; both use local vernaculars in contexts of global cultural pressures; both focus, often minutely, on particular individuals caught at moments of historical change and significance and, therefore, articulate and explore ‘political’ consequences and issues; both play – gloriously, ironically, iconoclastically – with language registers as a way of exposing implied ‘bigger pictures’. And yet these two collections are worlds apart in focus, style, nuance, framing and poetic affect.
Australian Love Poems 2013, Mark Tredinnick, ed.
Inkerman & Blunt, 2013
‘… Day
is so deep already with involvement’
Michael Dransfield, ‘Pas de Deux for Lovers’ (1968)
In his 1951 essay ‘Against Poets’, Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz describes the poet ‘as a being who can no longer express himself as much as someone who must express – a Poem’. With such sentiment in mind I approached Australian Love Poems 2013 with some apprehension. Despite all the lofty rhetoric surrounding love poetry – and, understandably, there is plenty of it in the eloquent, generous introduction to this anthology by editor Mark Tredinnick – would it ultimately prove, as Gombrowicz might suggest, to be a ‘boring orgy’?
A quick shout out to Ken Bolton, John Hawke, Andy Kissane, Shari Kocher, Jo Langdon, Cameron Lowe, Ella O’Keefe, Louise Oxley, Ann Vickery and Jessica L Wilkinson … the ten poets featured in Black Inc’s Best Australian Poetry 2013 whose work first appeared in Cordite Poetry Review. Yeah. DayGlo cover, too.
Free Logic by Rachael Briggs
UQP, 2013
Winner of the 2012 Thomas Shapcott Prize, Free Logic is the debut collection from poet and philosopher Rachael Briggs. The book is divided into nine sections, each poetically exploring themes of love, identity, and sexuality. Briggs infuses her poetic explorations with surreal allegories, moments of metamorphosis and a constant teasing of the ‘logical’, which allow for her poetry to forge an opening towards new possibilities. Briggs strikingly connects insightful fantasies with philosophical considerations.
Listening to the Mopokes Go by Lucy Todd
Whitmore Press, 2013
‘Mopoke’ is the onomatopoeic nickname of the Southern Boobook or Tasmanian Spotted Owl, known in New Zealand (where I come from) as a ‘morepork’. This bit of idiom in the title of Lucy Todd’s debut chapbook prepares the reader for a collection attuned to its locality. ‘Listening’ also suggests the poet’s patient attention to sensory detail.
