Kevin Brophy



Invisible Walls: Poetry as a Doorway to Intercultural Understanding

The selection of poems we offer here is written by poets participating in a two-year intercultural exchange program between Korean and Australian poets.

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Carp

—as if its live weight is there beside my hand but with a Korean meaning I cannot fathom (each creature battered, vulnerable, caught, carries un-read meanings marked across a manuscript of sinew, scar and muscle) I read on into your …

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Light

Today I cleaned two long drops of venetian blinds. It was like rewriting a poem by discovering on each line dust, grease, coffee splashes, brittleness burned into every word. I felt like one of your shop assistants with no line …

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Translating

Saying, for instance, The last time I spoke to you might not be the last time I speak to you Following the path of a writer’s words sewn into the earth with a green thread and remembering nothing of what …

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John Bartlett Reviews Kevin Brophy and Linda Adair

Despite the publishing limitations in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 restrictions, Melbourne Poets Union remarkably released seven chapbooks last year in its new Blue Tongue Poets and Red-bellied Poets series, all under the auspices of the soon-to-retire editor, Tina Giannoukos.

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Unearthing the Greek in the Australian: an Account of Owl Publishing’s History and Foundation

Poetry publishers are an essential staple of the poetry community. When their existence is challenged by funding cuts, blinkered economic rationalisation and misguided consumerism, poets rail – as we should. But when a publisher like Owl Publishing quietly states, it …

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Review Short: Libby Hart’s Wild

Poetry might be whispering these days, but only fools fail to hear it. The whisper might be the tough sibilance of protest, it might be the swirl of nostalgia for what will soon be lost and irretrievable, it might be the resilient, gnomish murmur that tells of what cannot be suppressed, and cannot either ever be quite directly expressed. And so, Huginn and Muninn open Libby Hart’s new collection of poetry.

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The Redactions

2014 intercepted electronic communications, DOD… aphorism identified as a threat to national security. The aphorism envies the novel, the novel, of course, envies the haiku and the haiku envies the brief life of the leaf. – Gen PJ Burke, U.S. …

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Review Short: Kevin Brophy’s Walking,

Poetry collections aren’t prone to extensive reprints, so Kevin Brophy’s Walking, – which includes selections from five previous books – is somewhat of a trove for anyone wanting to access his earlier work. It also features a suite of new poems which, in their gentle complexity, are among his most interesting – testimony to a writer who’s carefully honed his craft over a 30-year stretch.

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Kevin Brophy Reviews Geoff Page

In a 2007 review of one of Geoff Page’s previous verse novels, Lawrie & Shirley, Peter Goldsworthy names Page as a verse-novel ‘multiple offender’ in the excellent company of Murray, Porter, Wearne and Rubinstein. Goldsworthy approaches discussion of the form by reflecting, ‘If poetry is the most ancient literary form, as old as music, then the verse novel is surely the most ancient form of poetry, using the word novel loosely’ (Australian Literary Review, May 2007). The long and respectable polygamous marriage of poetry with narrative and history was, we might say, dissolved during the Romantic period, allowing the novel to find its ecological niche – and more than a niche, a whole territory.

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Andy Jackson Reviews Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow

Radar. Green blips on a black screen. A large and vulnerable craft navigating a changeable world. A technological attempt to locate an invisible danger, or to give shape to darkness. All these associations emerge out of the poetry of Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow in their joint collection Radar, albeit in an intimate mode: these poets observe the ways in which we navigate through our lives in the contemporary world and improvise meaning. It is difficult, though, to talk about ‘the book’ because these two poets differ strikingly in their approaches.

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Poetry as Extorreor Monolothe: Finnegans Wake on Bakhtin

I was out drunk with friends one night in Perth, Western Australia. My father had just died. We were walking home, so to speak, and our path took us past the Church of Christ. At that, I launched myself at the wall of the church, found a toehold and lunged up into the air. I grasped the ‘t’ decal and with all my weight managed to prise it from the wall. The Church of Chris looked down upon us all. I continued on my way home, or rather to here, but not without the occasional somewhat gratified memory of the incident. I cannot help thinking of the sudden appearance of the Church of Chris as a sort of revelation, with something to say about the truth of something. That is what reading Finnegans Wake is like.

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Hard Rubbish

The four star fridge is on its side, surprised To find sunlight on its shelves, ice tray dry And its arctic green inside slowly warmed. Hopes once hung with suits in wardrobes are out with posters of the stars we …

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Paul Mitchell Reviews Pushing Words

“Pushing Words”, a poetry reading held as part of the Castlemaine State Arts Festival, featured Melbourne poets Dorothy Porter, Ian McBryde, Lauren Williams, Kevin Brophy, Ali Alizadeh, Jennifer Harrison and Myron Lysenko.

Organiser Ross Donlon promoted the event as a chance to catch top poets who you'd never see reading together on the one bill. Each poet gave a strong performance, no doubt influenced by the company around them.

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