- 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
Nicholas Powell
Christopher Brown Reviews Pam Brown and Nicholas Powell
The last poem of Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle, ‘(fundamentals)’ begins with the lines: “make a distinction / between imagery / & reality” (103). As much as the distinction in question evokes the verisimilitude of the fake, a need to separate unreliable image from truth, Stasis Shuffle’s interest in reality and authenticity goes deeper.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Christopher Brown, Nicholas Powell, Pam Brown
Vernal Funks & Bluffs
Training wheels won’t help you owe it to yourself Listening for bell-birds along a sagging power stave. If it seems too far-fetched a clue for going about it Bathe and persuade, establish evening routine. If it seeps too far forward …
Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Function of a Function
A little light on the reckoning stone lets limits become infinite for some value varying with the spheres, whatever the size of the constants. Bending the moment, the body will reach. Approaching zero our next step is to find value …
Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Flat Pamphlet Chat
The Slow Coach runs hourly for the liturgy and watercolours where the teddy bears’ fur shows how well loved they were. In addition to the sheep-pen and The Best Years of My Life, community singing, appealing figures in traditional dress. …
Posted in 82: LAND
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Headland
You slept on a bench and woke to trace a con- trail to dim rooms where you and I are inseparable. And yet you are alone, staring at wall- paper fairytales, hearing rumours on the lawn, tennis, tinkling cutlery and …
Posted in 70: UMAMI
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Review Short: Nicholas Powell’s Water Mirrors
Winner of the 2011 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Water Mirrors is Nicholas Powell’s first full-length collection of poems. Structured around an interweaving of landscapes – some real, others dreamed or imagined – the forty two poems that lead up to ‘The True Map’, the book’s final poem, can read as an exercise in cartography.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Claire Nashar, Nicholas Powell
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.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged brett dionysius, Nicholas Powell
Soft Classic
New room. Pillows thumped into shape. Twilight, pink and slim as hotel soap unwrapped and lathered, shrinks. From the bed, two small windows, one above the other, separated by a strip of wall which breaks the contained palm in two. …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Why Islands
For our next trick we disfigure the puma. O to be marooned with Ginger or Calypso. You have committed a horrible act involving an orange. Cheerio black sheep, dark horse, sore thumb. Go hunt coconut with slingshot, prize silence, imbibe …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Postcards from ‘The Neon Cactus’
I ‘Mother me, sunlight’. Fashionable mantras pass the time from one damp hand to the other, anesthetizing the old embarrassments I am writing you in order to water down. The hotelier has me make up the rooms, tart up the …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Nicholas Powell
GIBBERBIRD Editorial
This issue is a poetic conversation between a source poem and ten poems found from within its lines. It’s a refraction of language and image through poetic prisms, an intersection of the familiar and unfamiliar, blurring the edges through the 11 authors’ interpretations.
Q, Without My Female Typist
I believe I was the first to see the possibility of pulling up the timber and opening up this land. -J. Bjelke-Petersen. At the window ledge, meadow-edge, misreading Tranströmer: ‘The mind wind walks in the pine forest’. wind ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ mind …
Posted in 51: GIBBERBIRD
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Nicholas Powell Reviews Grant Caldwell
glass clouds by Grant Caldwell Five Islands Press, 2010 For nearly three decades Grant Caldwell has been writing some of the more interesting and fearless poetry in Australia. A relentless observer of the absurd and odd, Caldwell’s predominant tone has …
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Grant Caldwell, Nicholas Powell
Footing
My foot on the wood and the heat surging through it seems a bourgeois grandeur here in the public sauna. A long way from the hot bitumen of home. I am no exile, though I doubt I belong here in …
Posted in 35: CUSTOM
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Paddocks
Looking out across paddocks I fall silent. Here is the expanse I wanted inside myself. I am looking forward to an unbroken horizon the sun has disappeared behind. Say, I try to fly there, opening and closing a little wingspan …
Posted in 33: PASTORAL
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Variations in the Pupils
Say it is a pink deceit, the dawn sky, a trick of light and atmosphere shaped in the eye. The outlook varies depending on whose eye we look through. Yet for every eye it is true enough, trawling over peculiar …
Posted in 33: PASTORAL
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Late Winter
Sunday night. Faint sirens paint the town. I am thinking of the forest at the city limits, of tall pines creaking in the still air. How long they have stood there waiting for the osprey to return and fix their …
Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES
Tagged Nicholas Powell
Nick Powell Reviews Robert Hass
'Poets are turtles', the American poet William Matthews once remarked, meaning that with few exceptions, the good ones mature slowly, often producing strong verse into their sixties, an age that he, unfortunately, didn't reach. Matthews shared with Robert Hass a rare skill for the long, intricately made, rhythmic lyric, which Hass has been perfecting for over thirty years.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Nicholas Powell, Robert Hass, Tomas Tranströmer
