In the opening poem of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd newly dispossessed of his farm by a soldier returning from war exclaims: ‘There’s so much trouble everywhere these days. / I was trying to drive my goats along the path / And one of them I could hardly get to follow; Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor …’ (trans. David Ferry). More than 600 years later, Poussin’s painting ... (read more)
Judith Bishop
Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.
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Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on oth ... (read more)
But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods.
Hölderlin
Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have set down in a hangar. The children stare at us. Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know, now we fly from land to land seeking comfort, what it takes to cure lack once and for all. Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist to any bloomin ... (read more)
In May 2021, scientists at Woebot Health, a US-based artificial intelligence company, published a paper titled ‘Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established with a Digital Conversational Agent’. Reading it back then, I felt like a door had suddenly opened from nowhere. But not just any door: this one led directly to a passage into human inner life and one of its most intimate dimensions: the natu ... (read more)
Where the mind comes from, where it goes, when the moon rose, where among the stars the light was seen as you were born: if it glistened in the tracks stamped on leaves across the park where we walked the early afternoon, alert, listening up, hearing how the plovers pipe back and forth across the grass …
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Alcatraz is an international anthology of prose poems which builds on the success of previous collaborations between the artist Phil Day and poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington. Contributors include many outstanding poets from the United States (twenty-eight), the United Kingdom (ten), and Australia (thirteen), with smaller numbers of poets from India, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, V ... (read more)
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In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a mat ... (read more)
As ifthe black windowat the solitary passfrom I to this (or you or now)could let a human mindslip through the glassonce,let’s practise seeing water,looking hard at the harbour,that detritus of wornmussel shells, rock ledgesgraffitiedwith an ecstasyof lichen, waveswriting out the riddlesof harmonics,breath heldfor a momentas Elizabeth Bishopin her posthumous voicesays cold dark deep and absolutel ... (read more)