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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.

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We bring the horses back to their own fields because we like / To see them among purple hay as if they signify black seeds / A hoof can break any kind of feeling along a dramatic stretch / The gate is where I go to then proclaim my woes to his street ...

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There’s no getting away from things. / There is driving, then walking miles / along a quiet coast on a rising tide – / with the back-of-the-mind consciousness / that in an hour or so the sea ...

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Imagine how the light / fell on their desks. / Clerks in rotation / elbowed into the ’30s / with their heated office / coffee unimpeded ...

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Before you could say Jack Robinson, I was posting / a letter in the box that looks like a lean-to / at the crepuscular end of the mind. The fire-fangled glow / from the South kept sending small birds into the air ...

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It’s our runaway imaginings that seduce us / away from the meanwhiler pleasures: / even as we cross each i, dot every t, / we calibrate our fantasies like rare treasures, / false memory-to-be ...

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Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the rain blew you / into the backseat, steaming and boisterous, my quiet son / and you his not-friend-Dad-we-only-share-some-classes, / or late evenings, sunset dampening down the final lap ...

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This time around / they say, we won’t / be at loggerheads, // we’ve understood / you can’t measure up, / we’ll do maths & spelling

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a poem is a house into which / words are inserted // permeable, vapour or rain / altering the light outside ...

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When Ishmael escaped from the closed Bible / on the dresser with family names that were // only tangentially yours, you looked to the emergency / site for inclemency and found fire was rapidly ...

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When I scooped fists of never-garden dirt into the song-hole, /  I never felt more able. // When these wrists start to ache without pause from the carrying, / why, I will wrap them in a bandage.

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