Todd Turner



This Be The Chorus

after Philip Larkin Like mine and yours before, Theirs, and my own to come, Our flow-on of flaws is more Or less the root of the sum. When faults are handed down, Where can you lay the blame? You end …

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Tale of Monastic Life

My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk —John Keats Wintering in golden years, Keats ditched the pen and donned the cloth. He made good use of his time on this planet, singing the co-ordinates of the sublime: …

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

The Fall

for Ella I can tell you, when your horse began to slip she tried to pull you and herself back up. But once she slid and lost her footing, you both fell into the law of gravity and came down …

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Villanelle for a Calf

I can still remember the sound. The calf fell in, the gates shut hard. I turned my eyes toward the ground. He could hardly move or turn around and was woken to truth there in the yard. I can still …

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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!

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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’.

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Review Short: Todd Turner’s Woodsmoke

The poetry in Todd Turner’s debut collection Woodsmoke explores topographies of land and memory. Comparable to the approach of Australian poets such as Philip Hodgins and Brendan Ryan, many of Turner’s poems explore human interactions with rural landscapes. Turner’s biographical note indicates that his ‘parents were from farming families in the town of Koorawatha, situated on the Western Plains of New South Wales’ (v). Like Hodgins and Ryan, Turner is unafraid to include autobiographical references within many of his poems.

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A Field of Wild Grass

It was a field of wild grass between two stations on the western line; a dusky acreage where the barn owl plucked the field- mouse from its ditches. There was a lone tree on the far side of the field …

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