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Jan Owen

'String says' by Jan Owen | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two

in my end is my beginning – just

a rat’s nest coiled in back-shed dust,
a tangle of demented knots

gothic as the Grimms’ dark plots,
a thrumming song of wreak and wreck

(whose satin bed, whose trusting neck?),
the tautened threat from fist to fist,

the carpe diem tug and twist.
My image haunts your DNA,

that tiny ruthless shadow ...

'Indoor Cricket' by Jan Owen | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two

Indoor Cricket 

Insects are nature’s netsukes, and, by jiminy, crickets are such bright creatures. JJO

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'Rhyme' by Jan Owen | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two

This ‘structural scandal’, tongue’s yen for kin
as family is a sort of chime, the thrift
of loaves and fishes unconsumed by scorn,

is natural as natural history
with all its modulations of again –
seed, crystal, comet, crocus, rain.

Even our code’s in rhyme – adenine,
cytosine, guanine and thymine – turn
and turn again (cynghanedd rule ...

'Woman Holding a Balance' by Jan Owen | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two

after the painting by Jan Vermeer

Two strands of pearls, warm cream, cool blue,
are spilling over a coffer and onto
a crumple of ultramarine against a wall
below a yellow curtain shifting the muted light.
Four gold coins and a silver ducat
wait to be weighed along the table edge,
but the sidelong mirror’s narrow sliver can find
no avarice in ...

'Venetian Blinds' by Jan Owen | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two

Heaved up or fountained down, the wooden slats breathe a shirr
and clattered repeat of the mill of their making, a satisfactory thud

like the outcome of a stock plot. Half hoist, they hang askew with a
pained smile, and bell pulls for self-service which pirouette

to a glut of knots. Tilt by tilt they’ll orchestrate your day, underlining gloom
and overruling ligh ...

About Jan Owen | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two

Jan Owen NEW FEB 2017Jan Owen lives at Aldinga Beach, fifty kilometres south of Adelaide. Her translations from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal were published in 2015 by Arc Publications. A New and Selected, The ...

Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Jan Owen

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January-February 2016, no. 378
Brian Nelson reviews 'Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal' by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Jan Owen

The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) is the most celebrated and most influential collection of verse in the history of modern French poetry. Its author, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), is seen as the embodiment of a sensibility we regard as 'modern'. T.S. Eliot called him 'the greatest exemplar of modern poetry in any language'.

Ba ...

Poems 1980-2008 by Jan Owen

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September 2008, no. 304
David Gilbey reviews ‘Poems 1980-2008’ by Jan Owen

Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language.

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Eclogues: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2007 edited by Martin Harrison, John Jenkins and Jan Owen

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June 2008, no. 302

The moon rising ‘nicotine-stained and peaceable / into the fingers of the silver trees’, arid land freshly rained on ‘like a dark sticky biscuit’, and a cow’s head like a ‘rounded anvil’: these are images plucked from the winning and highly commended poems of Mark Tredinnick, Barry Hill and Andrew Slattery, respectively, from last year’s Newcastle Poetry Prize. Notice the bucolic theme – these top three poems are all, loosely speaking, narrative poems in pastoral settings. This is partly why this printed anthology of the prize’s shortlist has borrowed its name from the title of Tredinnick’s award-winning poem.

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Boy with A Telescope by Jan Owen & The Twofold Place by Alan Gould

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February–March 1986, no. 78
Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Boy with A Telescope' by Jan Owen and 'The Twofold Place' by Alan Gould

The ways of poetry are many but sometimes, as it turns out, they are simply oppositional. These two new volumes of poetry from Angus & Robertson could easily have been produced as the occasion for some compare-and-contrast parlour game. The first, and continuing, thing to be said about them is that Gould is strong on artistic form whereas Owen is strong on life. The harder question to ask about any writer is whether it is better to be good at forms or to be full of life. Both, you will say, of course; but then we can’t have everything.

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