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Australian Poetry

Comfort (Hansel to Gretel in the Darkness)

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November 2005, no. 276

Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –

no fear of darkness in the singing wood.

Hear the threnody written on the wind:

a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow

path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:

... (read more)

Pomegranate Duty

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November 2005, no. 276

The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine

In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.

... (read more)

Waterview Street

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November 2005, no. 276

In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

... (read more)

The Past Completes Me: Selected poems 1973–2003 by Alan Gould

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October 2005, no. 275
Martin Duwell reviews 'The Past Completes Me: Selected poems 1973–2003 ' by Alan Gould

Alan Gould’s writing career began in the early 1970s when he was one of the ‘Canberra Poets’. This substantial selection covers thirty years and clearly shows both the achievements and the limitations of his work: I think the former outweigh the latter. One of the strengths of his poetry is a consistent vision; thirty years gives the opportunity for that to be explored in all its ramifications. The centre of this vision is history or, in its unintellectualised form, the past. Almost all the poems relate to this in one way or another. Even the later poems of humour or love or the waiting for a child’s birth are framed by the overriding meditation on the past, so that, though they are expressions of an intimate personal life, it is one conducted on the surface of the immense, slowly changing patterns of history.

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Parrotology

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October 2005, no. 275

A couple of months ago, driving with my daughter just outside the wheat-belt town of York, Western Australia, we came across a ‘28’ parrot that had just been struck by a car. I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter held it on the back seat until we could get home. Having been bitten numerous times by those ‘strong and hooked’ beaks, I warned her to be wary. But the parrot – a splay of emerald, turquoise, black and yellow feathers – was too dazed to bite, and clearly had a broken wing. Though we’ve always called these beautiful birds 28s, technically they are a ring-necked parrot, and possibly even the Port Lincoln variety of ring-necked. The demarcation lines between varieties are hazy. The local ‘nickname’ matters as local names do. We eventually handed the injured bird over to the local ‘bird lady’, who later let me know that it had died due to massive brain damage. My daughter doesn’t know it died. She said it was the closest she’d ever come to something so ‘amazing’. I left it at that.

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Beach Burial

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October 2005, no. 275

for Craig Sherborne

 

‘Grief wrongs us so.’

                                                  Douglas Dunn

To the sea we bear our fathers in state –

or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.

Surf mild as receding tides,

we slump in dunes with our burdens,

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‘Equation’ a poem by Anthony Lawrence

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September 2005, no. 274

The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher

who begets the rainbow bee-eater

who begets the firetailed finch

who begets the forty-spotted pardalote

who begets the damsel fly

who begets the jewelled beetle

who begets a pentangle of reflected light

that falls on a colony of dust mites

... (read more)

West of Al Shualla

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September 2005, no. 274

(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)

 

Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.

Nobody answers him.

She’s got dark hair that stops

just above her shoulders.  Turns up at the ends.

She’s very slim, Max says.

He’s talking to Hamid

about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,

whom he is hoping to meet

somewhere south of Baghdad.

... (read more)

Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems by Luke Davies

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August 2004, no. 263
Oliver Dennis reviews 'Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems' by Luke Davies

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

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Inside Out: An autobiography by Robert Adamson

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April 2004, no. 260
Owen Richardson reviews ‘Inside Out: An autobiography’ by Robert Adamson

Aptly, John Ashberry has described Robert Adamson as ‘one of Australia’s national treasures’. Since the late 1960s Adamson has been a vital presence in the renaissance of Australian poetry, both in his own work and as an editor and publisher. The immense command of his writing, its trajectory from the early postmodernist explorations of the poet’s voice and the possibilities of Orphic vision to the clear lyricism of his Hawkesbury poems, has made Adamson one of the reasons why Australian poetry, as Clive James often points out, is as good as any being written in English at the present time. And there is an extraordinary story behind the writing, which comes through in the poetry, and which Adamson now relates in Inside Out: An Autobiography.

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