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States of Poetry Series Two

we remembered
your face, pink, lit like we’d never seen it
when your hands at your shoulders met his
       for the Pride of Erin
the ease of your gliding
       for the three-four Modern Waltz
that marquisite brooch on the bodice
of your teal best dress

your stepping in perfect union on the dance flo ...

Josephine Clarke grew up in the South West of Western Australia, the daughter of Italian migrants. After gaining an Arts Degree and a Dip. Ed. at the University of Western Australia, she taught English at high school before travelling to other states and countries with her family. Josephine has had short stories and poetry ...

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For my mother

The young men,
friends of our middle one,
camp nights in your bed.
Some leave it with hospital corners,
some leave it like a lair to revisit
and some make cocoons on top.
In most cases
they are shaping up.
On kitchen raids
they all report sound sleep
and I wonder what it is
that breaches their dreams
as t ...

In crisis
I go to the local library
and do not take out
the book I find,
this one or that one first,
what matter?
Outside beside my car
sits a strange chrome and vinyl seat,
part of a vanity set,
stranded, hieratic, ruined,
like the beautiful straight-backed
low seated chair-people
of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche.
I ...

The old cat and dog
now sleep in our room
in an uneasy truce
between the floor and bed.
It is as if they are not sure
the house exists
once we no longer light it
or move about it,
once we lie down
in agreement it is night.
It’s come to sit on my chest,
their Stilnox camaraderie,
and when I wake in snatches
I have thought differe ...

I lie on the couch
like a beaten dog
as Philip Mould advances
on his latest art forensics
and there are these absolutely
free and liberated daubs
of greens and browns
in close-up on the screen.
They are of the earth
in a surprising and counter way
to all that sateen, country houses,
rich people by the yard.
And from my beaten dog pose< ...

Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo, 2007), Meanderthals (Web del Sol), and The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), which won the WA Premier's Book Award for Poetry in 2016. She holds a PhD from UWA on representations of Naples. She currently works as Program Director for the China–Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University ...

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Poetry, in ‘stilling things’, as Martin Heidegger suggested in 1950, is nevertheless always restlessly active. These six voices are six stills from a fast-moving history of poetry in Western Australia. They are evidence that poetry can provide moments we can enter into in suspended silence while experiencing that movement and ...

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