- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
Judith Beveridge
Winner and Commended Writers in the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Val Vallis Award
Helen Lucas has won the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Val Vallis Prize with ‘Heirloom’; Sarah Rice wins second prize with ‘My Time in Govie Housing Draws to a Close’ and Rae White wins the Highest Queensland entry for ‘The last …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Helen Lucas, Judith Beveridge, Kirli Saunders, Rae White, Sarah Rice
A King Sends a Delegation to Meet a Clan in the South
We’ve heard they make music by tying tin pots to donkeys, yanking on the ropes then beating them with wooden goads. We’ve heard their highest cultural achievement is a poetry that never veers from the subject of spitting in public …
Posted in 96: NO THEME IX
Tagged Judith Beveridge
2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award Winner
Damen O’Brien is the winner and the runner up to the 2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award, managed by our longtime partner, Queensland Poetry Festival.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Damen O'Brien, Judith Beveridge, Tamryn Bennett, Yvette Holt
‘You’re never disembodied from the action’: Dylan Frusher Interviews Judith Beveridge
Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry and throughout her writing life she has received multiple awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Dylan Frusher, Judith Beveridge
Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems
Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems begins with the eponymous poem of her debut collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987), concerning a giraffe in a zoo.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David McCooey, Judith Beveridge
Driving to Broken Hill
Distance—continuous, ungestured. Crows on fence-wire-watch stretching into a haze. When a kestrel hovers it’s an abundance— like water, or a horizon with a hill. We pass towns, streets written-off by dogs and half-asleep dreamers. Those who live at the edges …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Judith Beveridge
NO THEME VI Editorial
It was a great privilege, if a little overwhelming (I had about 1,800 poems to read), to edit this edition of Cordite Poetry Review and, as it is not themed, I had the luxury of choosing poems on various subjects. I have tried to make the issue varied but also unified by my aesthetic principles.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Judith Beveridge
Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?
Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alan Gould, Corey Wakeling, David McCooey, David Musgrave, J S Harry, James McAuley, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson, les murray, Martin Langford, Max Harris, Pam Brown, Paul Hetherington
Introduction to Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses
Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses is a complex exploration of identity, an identity exposed in clear yet layered language, a language that takes us to the core of what he has experienced as a ‘queer Muslim Arab Australian from Western Sydney, from a broke and broken family.’
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alissa Dinallo, Judith Beveridge, Lily Mae Martin, Omar Sakr
Submission to Cordite 80: NO THEME VI
Poetry for Cordite 80: NO THEME VI is guest-edited by Judith Beveridge. Here’s what I’m looking for: poems of fewer than 100 lines, on any theme or style. So that’s about as succinct as you can get. Judith worked Cordite …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Judith Beveridge, Kent MacCarter
Resort Town
Sunset here is the distant roar of motorbikes, and down Pacific Street, I hear the enormous rage that fills the mosquito’s head. Flies still circle the day’s unalterable groove. A gull pierces the distance like a sail needle. Summer’s already …
Posted in 74: NO THEME V
Tagged Judith Beveridge
Rory
We’d often see Rory outside the shed trying to classify the clouds coming in on the evening wind — clouds he thought were the farm’s clip of fine-grained wool. On clear blue days he’d strike match after match and try …
Posted in 71: TOIL
Tagged Judith Beveridge
Judith Beveridge’s Twelve Highlights from 2014
Throughout 2014, Judith Beveridge selected one poem per month to spotlight in Cordite Poetry Review, and she delivered excellent choices … writing a bit to each selection. We have compiled them all here in one article. Enjoy!
Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye
Last year I heard Judith Beveridge interviewed by Bronwyn Lea at the 2014 Queensland Poetry Festival. Aside from being left with the enduring impression that Lea should have her own TV show, I was also struck by a number of Beveridge’s revelations regarding her praxis. Beveridge confessed, for instance, that she does not like listening to music. Nevertheless, she described the process of writing poetry in a way that resonated with the classical foundations of lyric verse in music. Beveridge revealed that she begins writing by mobilising rhythm, rhyme, feeling and alliteration to bring forth the words and images of her poetry. She begins, in other words, from an embodied experience of language – as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it in The Phenomenology of Language – that is essential to us all.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bronwyn Lea, Judith Beveridge, Maria Takolander, Paul Kane
Duncan Hose Reviews Best Australian Poems 2014
Being in and of one’s time (in favour of it, in fact) means producing work that is sensitive to the discursive furies of the day – the atmosphere of mutating code that the poet must stick to poems in new and strange forms. All else is nostalgia and denial. No-one knows what it means that Australia’s imperial republic, whose god has finally been revealed as cosmopolitan capitalism, is, in the history of colonies, still in its infancy yet so impressively seems to be approaching an end of days. If you’ve got burnt chaps and a warm six-shooter (cowgirl), these are exciting times.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Cassandra Atherton, Duncan Hose, Geoff Page, Judith Beveridge, michael farrell, Samuel Wagan Watson
Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: At Willabah
I forget who it was who said that the writer needs to be ‘holy in small things’, but I think there is a great deal of truth in that. That’s one reason why I’m attracted by Todd Turner’s poem ‘At Willabah’. Here, the poet guides us through the details of the landscape in a not dissimilar way to the deep engagement with particulars in such poems as Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Judith Beveridge, Todd Turner
When the Wind Stopped
I read somewhere that the words ‘ekphrasis’ and ‘ekphrastic’ had at one stage a reference only in the Oxford dictionary, but nowadays these words are very much part of poets’ vocabularies and practices and most poets at some stage write …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Erin Shiel, Judith Beveridge
Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry
John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).
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 …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Judith Beveridge, Mona Attamimi
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 …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Judith Beveridge, Paul Scully
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 …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Chloe Wilson, Judith Beveridge, Kent MacCarter, Sarah-Holland-Batt
Emily Bitto Reviews Judith Beveridge
In her 1996 collection, Accidental Grace, Judith Beveridge published a series of six poems entitled ‘The Buddha Cycle’. The poems in ‘The Buddha Cycle’ are each spoken by individuals, predominantly low in the caste system, who look to the Buddha for some hope or guidance. This marked the beginning of what has be-come, for Beveridge, an enduring interest in the Buddha and Buddhist history, a subject she has approached from a number of shifting perspectives.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Emily Bitto, Judith Beveridge
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 …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Caroline Ross, Judith Beveridge
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 …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Dimitra Harvey, Judith Beveridge
