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Poem

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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goldsworthy

Episode #184

It might be … P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet

By Michael Shmith

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.

Recent episodes:


I have two eyes and almost two noses / The lips of one face curve to meet my second / Neither of them look straight ahead.

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Nightfall on the sill. Trinkets, hardened dust. Sky / in the gaps of a broken comb – the medley // of towers, antennae. The city: a queue / for dinner at a swish place, or a catwalk.

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The joy of rhizomes. / Four makes of bamboo / volunteering everywhere, / a kind of supergrass. / ‘Hello, it’s me.’

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There could be someone, there, walking through a forest – upright or / slightly bending – gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms, / but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down

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When life hides behind the mulch / of what lives, can they expect more / than this refusal to hold each other in the open?

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What is the use of a full moon / now we do not harvest by its light? // There is no one else standing here, / lifting their face to the star-studded sky.

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Because of its gloomy appearance the building is like a defeated army, and the gloom is so heavy it makes handling difficult and postage quite out of the question.

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My husband has returned. A traveller whose flight was cancelled has found his way home. He slowly unpacks while I make space for the unexpected.

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Beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio / of tourist thrum stirs guards to the mike. / Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video.

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Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks, / in the gardens, under a shade sail, / my father is crying about Winston Churchill. / Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel ...

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