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Poem

All those years
of trying to understand
which of this is her
which of this is me?
Getting at the truth
was always so confusing
amidst her craziness;
how to separate?
And though the shrink said
put her in a box –
I never quite could

...

Weather in which I might be
elsewhere, lounging
book in hand, Tim Tams
(dark, perhaps), tea a given,

instead of the uphill pram push of swaying kids,
singing drunkenly –
what a coachman circa 1840
or his horse felt, probably,

...

In ABR's second 'Poem of the Week' ABR Editor Peter Rose introduces and reads his poem 'The Subject of Feeling'.

... (read more)
I can’t speak my grandmother’s tongue and I’ve never been on my grandfather’s land.  I’ve traveled here and I’ve traveled there, my culture is fabricated in government-funded laboratories ... ... (read more)

In ABR's sixth 'Poem of the Week' Judith Beveridge discusses and reads her poem 'As Wasps Fly Upwards'

... (read more)

If I were to write down a list
of everything I miss I’d miss
the most important thing,
an irregular pearl. Not gifts –
books on corvids, Wild Lone,
‘Ballad of Gordon, Alpha Cock,
who clawed to death a fox
and Bedlington terrier’ – or this

...

If I ask myself why I write about lakes
(again and again the task of keeping on course)
I think how the lake veers and veers, always left –
I start that way, land bulked on my right
for my abler hand to be sure, eye and the witless
other hand still feeling, open to water,
half-trained, shaping and stopping intervals on rounded
strings sounding in the mind ti ...

Read the six shortlisted poems in the 2015 Porter Prize. ... (read more)

after Koch/Cohen, Malley/Breton, Roussel!

This, too, is about a thousand characters. It’s much like the
last one. I wouldn’t even read beyond the following sentence.
The following sentence is a silky thing – purple in the late
day, drizzled in afternoon fog. Inside a microwave oven is