brett dionysius



Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2016

Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2016 Selection panel: Chloe Wilson and Robert Sullivan Winner …

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , , , ,

The Surface of Last Scattering

(i) Spacetime The rate of decay of his cells was a clock. A sub-atomic timepiece that measured his lifespan & how fast his body was dying. People are so many small mechanisms all ticking away. His heart was a carriage …

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David Dick Reviews Ken Bolton and B. R. Dionysius

Ken Bolton and B.R. Dionysius emerge from different traditions, respectively: a New York School sense of everyday occasion punctuated by the presence and shaping forces of contemporary art (Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler are clearly present in Bolton’s diction); and a modernised kind of Romantic pastoral, littered with juxtaposed objects of the natural and contemporary world. Yet, at admitted risk of over-generalising, both of their recent books can be seen to be dealing with notions of how to write memory in poetry: how to write a poem to be honest to the process, even the implication itself, of remembering. How can language be used in the service of this retrospective vision, they ask; how does language, shaped by differing poetic forms, illuminate, distort or neutralise it?

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Six Shifts at the VISY Recycling Plant, Heidelberg

(i) Let me introduce you to Chute. Chute is problematic, has four or five personas a first version of Iron Man perhaps but anti-hero, more Alex from A Clockwork Orange than Gough Whitlam; the easy political duality of the seventies …

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Protein Gradients

Dire Wolf (10,000 BC) Canis dirus We were going along okay when you upped & changed the status quo. Our Super-sized Menu died off through your public meddling. Your nutritional requirements affected us direly, Our epoch had evolved the first …

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Review Short: B.R. Dionysius’s Bowra

B.R Dionysius’ Bowra is a collection of fifty-two prose sonnets of sustained intensity and engagement with place, from the fringes of southeast Queensland’s urban sprawl, west to Cunnamulla, with excursions to California and Kazakhstan. These poems count the human and environmental cost of various man-made tragedies. The fourteen-line constraint works to unravel an anecdote and/or piece of narrative sequence at once self-contained and part of the larger ambition of the book: to serve as a selective local history. The consistently restive and physical language is as uncompromised, and at times bewildering, as the landscapes and situations it describes.

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Tears in Rain

for Nola Andrews (i) mother watches w-droplets & planet’s blood pressure falls. in sixty thousand years will big Mars glow her memory radiate again? misses meteor shower over brisbane, four children fracture & depart. silver hair; gelatin frost plate -67° …

Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC | Tagged

On Not Having Encountered Snow, Aged 43

The Siberian whimbrel, all the weight of a human hand Gestures to the artic wind as it rises, never looking back, As if the greater insult is to survive winter’s chokehold. The fingers of its wing feathers adjust reflexively to …

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Margie Malley: Fahrenheit 451

good example of good literature cold – very little human touch her house was the opposite of montag’s, full of life montag: state of confusion sense of saying it hasn’t any lenient feelings sense of speaking that if they programme …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

Weranga

The cattle grid jolted him back; it was where the green Tree snake coiled itself like a stowed garden hose around The railway iron & they refused to cross, the gap of fear Too great. An Apostlebird greeted his return, …

Posted in 35: CUSTOM | Tagged

Tim Wright Reviews Luke Beesley and B. R. Dionysius

'The shape of sunlight cutting up your arm'. This was the line that first drew me to Luke Beesley's work. Around the same time I read a biographical note that mentioned how Beesley had written many of the poems in a light-filled studio in the middle of Brisbane. There was the suggestion that light had entered the poems in some way, and I liked the idea that poetry could do that.

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Benito Di Fonzo Reviews B. R. Dionysius

The title poem of Bacchanalia by B. R. Dionysius is a muscular, vivacious and absorbing piece of prose poetry that starts like a fifteen year old's diary entry but morphs darkly into something more akin to a police statement. It is original and exciting. Unfortunately, however, many other poems in this collection do not share these qualities.

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Burmese Black-lipped Bullfrog

If the West were let in, we'd be the Frank ?´N Furters Of the amphibian world — black lipstick clad mouths On the prowl for evolution's democratic buzzword. Amoral, bi-sexual fraternisation between parties only Enhances the underground's reputation for risqué. …

Posted in 23: EDITORIAL INTERVENTION | Tagged

On Not Having Encountered Snow, Age 35

(i) Snow is distant like death. A blond field of wheat stubble stalk frozen after harvest. Heat in the eye of the Nankeen kestrel that jump jets over paddocks & locks onto mouse holes, thermals raging as Westerlies plug in. …

Posted in 23: EDITORIAL INTERVENTION | Tagged

Astroboy

Pint-sized robot boy, post-atomic Pinocchio. My searchlight eyes, laser fingers & machine Gun bum. Energy cassettes fed me, progeny Of Tezuka: Jap culture sick of giant things – Yamato, Hiroshima, Godzilla, Ronin Mishima. A machine family loved me, management too. …

Posted in 22: ROBO | Tagged

R2 D2 & C-3PO

For fifty years I've tried to lose that brass Knucklehead. I don't know on how many Planets, on how many Death Stars, I've tried To ditch his Oscar plated arse, but always he Manages to stick around like a bad …

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Generation Upon Generation

B. R. Dionysius directed the Queensland Poetry Festival from 1997-2001 and is currently the editor of papertiger: new world poetry #04. In 1998 he was awarded the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry by the University of Newcastle.

Posted in 19: ANTI/HEROES | Tagged

World Within World

BIO: B. R. Dionysius has co-authored an artists' book, The Barflies' Chorus (Lyre Bird Press, 1995) and two solo collections of poetry, Fatherlands (Five Islands Press, 2000) and Bacchanalia (Interactive Press, 2002). He was short-listed in the 2002 Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize for Fatherlands. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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Komninos Zervos Reviews Papertiger #3

The third CD-ROM of poetry has been released by Papertiger Media and yet again presents the work of many of Australia's finest contemporary poets. As well, the Editors have included an eclectic array of international contributors from Canada, Finland, the UK, the USA and Australasia. More interestingly it is the expanded use of the new digital format of this collection i.e. the CD-ROM.

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Caligula’s Barges

B. R. Dionysius directed the Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival from 1997-2001 and is currently the Assistant Editor of papertiger: new world poetry. In 1998 he was awarded the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry by the University of Newcastle. He is the author of two poetry collections, Fatherlands (Five Islands Press, 2000) and Bacchanalia (Interactive Press, 2002). He won the inaugural IP Picks 2002 Awards and was short-listed in the 2002 Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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Richard King Reviews Papertiger #02

A poetry journal on CDROM is apt to raise some absorbing questions about the nature and status of poetry, and in this respect the second issue of papertiger: new world poetry doesn't disappoint. In an interview with Dorothy Porter, the question of poetry's ability to move beyond its 'established' boundaries – in Porter's case generic boundaries – inspires this little exchange:

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An Amerikan Trilogy

Look away, look away, look away Dixieland. -Elvis Presley (i) Ode to Saphenus Ligation Everyone in An Anthology of New York Poets (Circa 1970) is ugly 70s vinyl ugly. Ted Berrigan. Dick Gallup. Tom Veitch. Bill Berksen spruces up the …

Posted in 11: COPYLEFT | Tagged