Margaret Bradstock



Stillness

“There is no road, the road is made by walking.” -Antonio Machado. There is always a war somewhere, a party going on, or a fireworks display elsewhere in the cosmos, the strange busyness of humanity, jackhammering away at silence. In …

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Winter Crow

(for J.C) Lockdown, an empty beach pockmarked with yesterday’s footprints, now sculpted by morning tides coarse sand, the coldest of grain. Driftwood lingers, and a solitary crow eying the movement of waves, undeterred by silence, isolation transience, its own chill …

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Waiting for the Byron Train

Waiting on the southbound platform in still humid air, for the long journey home, half-listening to buskers, bands blasting out from a nearby pub, you keep a close eye on checked-in luggage, wheeled out in a trolley, now unattended the …

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Margaret Bradstock Reviews Phyllis Perlstone’s The Bruise of Knowing

The Bruise of Knowing is Phyllis Perlstone’s third collection of poetry from Puncher & Wattmann, and arguably her best to date. It tells the story of Sir John Monash, highlighting themes of ambition, power and warfare.

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The Navigators

There are many seas, organ-pipe rocks. Sometimes we drift for months, and wake to the dog-watch of night, on our lips the bitter taste of land. Our anchored ship perched on the ocean’s skin, we hear the hull’s creak, keening …

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Sun Tong Lee and Company, Gulgong, 1872

A Chinaman with strange and delicious sweets that melted in our mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children. − Henry Lawson, Christmas in the Goldfields Sun Tong Lee, Storekeeper and Importer has large shipments to arrive from …

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Skywatchers

As we climb the dim-lit verges of Observatory Hill, once Windmill Hill bicycle lamps whirl past like fireflies, orbiting in the dark city kids kick-boxing or exercising in green space, lights blinking on the Bridge. We set up telescopes. The …

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Robyn Rowland Reviews Margaret Bradstock

Barnacle Rock is time-travelling through poetry. Its significance lies in Margaret Bradstock’s successful inscribing of a journey, from the search for a land of plenty by various explorers, to the position we find ourselves in now: a climate in crisis, a civilisation in error and a country which has displaced its indigenous people, replacing their knowledge with a rusted ‘progress’. Dense, a rich read, it alerts the mind into awareness.

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Broken Ocean

“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 …

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