Poems
It is two fathers punching each other in the footy sheds
shadows extending over the river flats,
over the bachelor nursing a long neck on his porch
over the epileptic twisting on the mechanic’s floor.
Mud is loath to relinquish anything –
even in the name of science –
it will do so with a belch of methane
and black cloud in water.
The instruments are called ‘loggers’
Real estate: that’s all Postumia can think about,
always bragging about her ‘portfolio’,
dragging it round like a bad painter.
At last count she owns eight flats
in suburbs she’s never visited,
... (read more)‘A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber.’
Susan Howe
See,
how this slow tide
tugs
and sighs against
the flank of patient night –
the driving pulse that
aches towards the
fleck
of dawn then
shifts,
and curls around skin’s soft
warmth, that quiet space –
Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR's 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
... (read more)'Apotheoses and the Hölderlin Monument, Old Botanical Gardens, Tübingen', a new poem by John Kinsella.
... (read more)'If Looks Could Kill', a new poem by Stephen Edgar.
... (read more)'Death by Drowning', a new poem by H.R. Webster.
... (read more)'Metric', a new poem by Aidan Coleman.
... (read more)