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States of Poetry Poems

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Francesca Sasnaitis introduces Kate Llewellyn who reads her poem 'Oxytocin' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.

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Bill And Gwen

In Swiftian mood, insisting that
The human race would never learn,
Was hopeless, doomed, Bill Harwood, pure
Logician and philosopher,
As well as spouse of poet Gwen,

Proposed a universal ban
On sex to end our sorry ways
And brought our threesome's talk on how
The world was going to a halt
Of the socially awkward kind.

...

after David Brooks

Red-
tailed Bedouins
of Poetry, black
cockatoos embroider
the sun into us,
seam-rip it asunder.

*

On the Fitzroy's
bank at midday,
cracking seeds of eucalypts
that outrank Council, a hundred
Banks' black cockatoos,
a paroxysm of commas.

*

With their subtler
comp ...

Learning To Know One's Place

(For Gwen Harwood And James McAuley)

 

'Hello Graeme, old love, it's Gwen,
I'm sitting on a cloud too fine
For jealousy to let you see.
But please believe your ears as I

Exhort you not to bow to age,
To keep tramping around in search
Of at least one poem that will be
As sure of fame as all mine are ...

For Bill Harwood

 

A theorist of the purest kind,
Your lectures had no human warmth
And faded like a day-time moon.
The crueller said 'cloud-cuckoo land'

And loudly tapped their hollow heads.
Some thought you clinically disposed,
Contemptuous of eveything
Except the symbols on a page,

Myself included till you said
With gr ...