- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with 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
Peter Boyle
3 Juan Carlos Mestre Translations by Peter Boyle
“Antepasados” was published in La casa roja (Calambur, 2008); “Epístola del Giotto” and “Color Chagall” in La bicicleta del Panadero (Calambur, 2012). The Spanish poems are reproduced with permission. The English translations are previously unpublished. ANCESTORS Where does my memory …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Juan Carlos Mestre, Peter Boyle
Jennifer Compton Reviews Peter Boyle and Izzy Roberts-Orr
First, I salute Vagabond Press – its progenitors, its long-time toilers in the vineyard of poetry, its patrons, its cheer squad, and those who work in the shadows. Any small press, surely, is a hub of more-or-less willing volunteers. It is very expensive, in all sorts of ways, to make a book. Count the cost. But year after year after year, since 1999, Vagabond Press has been turning aside from the multifarious, ever-present griefs of the world, and privileging poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Izzy Roberts-Orr, Jennifer Compton, Peter Boyle
After reading Ko Hyeong-ryeol’s ‘I am not in Erdene Zuu Monastery’
If every thought has its own melody and some melodies land flat, bouncing back onto the earth, while others launch a little way into the air and linger just slightly beyond us, thoughts expressed in words, even if addressed only …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Peter Boyle
Apprenticeship
You had to go far inside the eye of a grasshopper, under tilting polar ice packs, under the taut shoulders of women rushing home, slinging a satchel of rice and vegetables into their haste, and then go further slipping between …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Peter Boyle
Five Companions
1. Small spider Next to the strawberries I am cutting on the kitchen counter you step out intent on exploring the world. Gladly I leave you your portion of the visible field and the privacy of your millennial appetites. …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Peter Boyle
Awaiting the Death Sentence, Alone in the Pavilion of Lost Swans, the Emperor Plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 in D Minor
Extending from sleeves of pure gold the Emperor’s hands uncurl their fingers across the piano’s darkly chequered counters. The earth is suddenly spinning in fast motion. And the beautiful black androgynous hair sweeps down his back, defying age. How long …
Posted in 93: PEACH
Tagged Peter Boyle
Israel Holas Allimant Reviews Poems of Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio & Jorge Palma
In 2017, Vagabond Press launched its Americas Poetry Series. This is a brave and much needed venture, one that borders on the quixotic: an Australian editor offering publications from poets from the Americas to the Australian reading public, for the love of poetry and the art of translation. So far, the series has three excellent entries focused on the translation of Spanish language Latin American poets into English.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Israel Holas-Allimant, Jorge Palma, Marosa di Giorgio, Olga Orozco, Peter Boyle
3 Translated Samuel Trigueros Espino Poems
Image courtesy of Festival de Poesía El Salvador PIGS ‘I have seen friends Circe turned into pigs. Her wheel, her diamond. The pigs don’t know my hideouts, mercenaries of shadows.’ –Edilberto Cardona Bulnes I have beheaded pigs, but Circe insists …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Peter Boyle, Samuel Trigueros Espino
Gabriel García Ochoa Reviews Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórques & Alí Calderón
This second volume in the series, Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón, focuses on contemporary Mexican poetry. It is translated by Sydney-based, Mexican-born Mario Licón Cabrera, a seasoned poet and translator. Licón Cabrera translates into both English and Spanish.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alí Calderón, Gabriel García Ochoa, Mario Bojórques, Mario Licón Cabrera, Mijail Lamas, Octavio Paz, Peter Boyle
Prithvi Varatharajan Reviews Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle’s Ghostspeaking belongs to a relatively rare poetic tradition, in which the poet creates heteronyms through which he or she writes. Indeed, the cover blurb of Ghostspeaking announces that the book contains ‘eleven fictive poets from Latin America, France and Québec. Their poems, interviews, biographies and letters weave images of diverse lives and poetics.’ As opposed to the pseudonym, which is merely a false name that allows the poet anonymity, the heteronym entails the creation of an entire life: not only distinctive poetic works, but also a biography for the poet that embeds them in real history.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Peter Boyle, Prithvi Varatharajan
Border Crossing
When you get there. At the frontier. It is very dangerous. Invisible precipices. Water sharp as knives. There are children playing between rocks. Many guns scan the bodies of the children. Suitcases tear open. A play of hands taking out …
Posted in 77: EXPLODE
Tagged Peter Boyle
2 Poems by Olga Orozco
Cartomancy The dogs that sniff out the lineage of ghosts, listen to them barking, listen to them tear apart the drawing of the omen. Listen. Someone approaches: the floorboards are creaking under your feet as if you will never stop …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Olga Orozco, Peter Boyle
from Marosa di Giorgio’s Funeral carriages laden with watermelons
What a strange species is the species angel. When I was born I heard them say “Angel”, “Angels”, or other names. “Spikenard”, “Iris”. Foam that grows on branches, the most delicate porcelain increasing all by itself. Spikenard. Iris.
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Marosa di Giorgio, Peter Boyle
Discovered in a Rock Pool
A star-shaped object rising up out of the water – five wavering arms, five spokes of a chariot wheel, five curved cylinders, at their centre a cluster of grey barnacles, small pearls, a silver light, the water that drips from …
Posted in 71: TOIL
Tagged Peter Boyle
Reclaimed Land: Australian Urbanisation and Poetry
In the late 1850s, Charles Harpur composed the image of ‘a scanty vine,/ Trailing along some backyard wall’ (‘A Coast View’). It might be forgettable, save for its conspicuousness in Harpur’s bush-obsessed poetry. Whether purple ranges or groaning sea-cliffs, his poems cleave to a more-than-human continent. The scanty vine, however, clings to a different surface: human-made – the craft of a drystone wall, perhaps, or wire strung through posts like the twist of the poetic line – it signals domestic land division. Harpur’s vine of words trails along the vertical edifice of settlement.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, Charles Harpur, Kate Fagan, Laurie Duggan, Lesbia Harford, Martin Harrison, Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng, Peter Boyle
José Kozer’s ‘Wherein it is seen how buried always inside me is a Jew’ in English and Spanish
Wherein it is seen how buried always inside me is a Jew To howl out ballads, to hear plainchant up ahead, constantly, right to the end. To tread ears of corn on Judgement Day, and see wholegrain bread emerge from …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged José Kozer, Peter Boyle
Jack Gilbert Gets ‘Foeted’
Anonymously they came for his bones hoping they would still hang with some flesh. ‘Blah blah’ said one, and ‘Yes yes’ said the other. Little too-mortal teeth ripping into the poems they knew were not the truth of it. ‘Oh …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged MTC Cronin, Peter Boyle
8 Poems by Gastón Baquero
Gastón Baquero by Eduardo Margareto Born in Banes, Cuba, in 1916, Gastón Baqero grew up in the countryside, a rural beginning that figures as one element in his, in many ways very urbane, poetry. He was part of the Orígenes …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Gastón Baquero, Peter Boyle
“A hundred mute gods”
(A hundred mute gods, their eyes all put out, crowd together on a stone altar. Starved of blood. Lingering on in their hunger for one more sunset. A Sybil dozing lightly in an iron lung prophesies.) It may be a …
Posted in 47: NO THEME!
Tagged Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle Reviews Yasuhiro Yotsumoto and Shuntaro Tanikawa
At the outset I will say that, though my own latest book Apocrypha was published by Vagabond Press, I hold no financial interest in the press nor any motivation to promote these two books other than the merits I find in them. The first collection under review, Yotsumoto’s Family Room, masterfully transcends the opposition between tradition and experiment; and Watashi, Tanikawa’s 20th collection to be published in English translation, certainly confirms this reviewer’s impression of being in the presence of a major poet.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged japan, Peter Boyle, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto
John Jenkins Reviews Peter Boyle
“No one can count the number of people we have been in a single / life. One death is never enough.” These lines from Apocrypha sum up a theme that resurfaces through the poetic fragments which make up this fabulous cache of texts: fragments which survive from certain lost books by real and re-discovered authors of the ancient world, including Herodotus, Longinus, Theophrastus, Catullus, Plato and others.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Jenkins, Peter Boyle
Bev Braune Reviews Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle strikes me as a poet who likes the air, much as Peter Minter likes water; Robert Adamson, leaves; Jordie Albiston, defined/confined spaces; John Tranter, lines or, rather, the lineage of the cursive. Boyle most reminds me of Robert Adamson with his gentle, probing style, his yearning approach to all that should be desirable–an understanding of ourselves in space and time, wherein we point all our limitations.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bev Braune, Peter Boyle
My soul is wet with the tears of impossible things
“My soul is wet with the tears of impossible things” — Federico Garcia Lorca, ‘Todo será el corazón’ On the surface of the eternal soul hundreds of verses moistened with our lives that have grown sick and weary. I carry …
Posted in 07: NORTHERN TERRITORY
Tagged Juan Garrido-Salgado, Peter Boyle
