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Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.

Judith Bishop on winning the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize

April 2006, no. 280 01 April 2006
Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on oth ... (read more)

'Icarus in C' by Judith Bishop

June 2008, no. 302 01 June 2008
But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods. Hölderlin Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have set down in a hangar. The children stare at us. Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know, now we fly from land to land seeking comfort, what it takes to cure lack once and for all. Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist to any bloomin ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews 'Algorithmic Intimacy: The digital revolution in personal relationships' by Anthony Elliott

December 2023, no. 460 27 November 2023
In May 2021, scientists at Woebot Health, a US-based artificial intelligence company, published a paper titled ‘Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established with a Digital Conversational Agent’. Reading it back then, I felt like a door had suddenly opened from nowhere. But not just any door: this one led directly to a passage into human inner life and one of its most intimate dimensions: the natu ... (read more)

'Arrival' a poem by Judith Bishop

November 2009, no. 316 01 November 2009
Where the mind comes from, where it goes, when the moon rose, where among the stars the light was seen as you were born: if it glistened in the tracks stamped on leaves across the park where we walked the early afternoon, alert, listening up, hearing how the plovers pipe back and forth across the grass … ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews 'Alcatraz', edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

September 2023, no. 457 27 August 2023
Alcatraz is an international anthology of prose poems which builds on the success of previous collaborations between the artist Phil Day and poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington. Contributors include many outstanding poets from the United States (twenty-eight), the United Kingdom (ten), and Australia (thirteen), with smaller numbers of poets from India, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, V ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews 'The Book of Falling' by David McCooey and 'A Foul Wind' by Justin Clemens

April 2023, no. 452 28 March 2023
In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a mat ... (read more)

'Harbour', a poem by Judith Bishop

September 2022, no. 446 25 August 2022
As ifthe black windowat the solitary passfrom I to this (or you or now)could let a human mindslip through the glassonce,let’s practise seeing water,looking hard at the harbour,that detritus of wornmussel shells, rock ledgesgraffitiedwith an ecstasyof lichen, waveswriting out the riddlesof harmonics,breath heldfor a momentas Elizabeth Bishopin her posthumous voicesays cold dark deep and absolutel ... (read more)

'Icarus at Kurraba Point' by Judith Bishop

April 2007, no. 290 01 April 2007
To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce that airless element, the body breathing calm within its envelope of gas … Morning took me to the jetty. I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared. ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews 'New and Selected Poems' by J.S. Harry

May 2022, no. 442 23 April 2022
J.S. Harry and her lapin alter ego, Peter Henry Lepus, would assuredly have had ‘words to say’ about the war in Ukraine and its manufacture by a group of human beings. Peter, a Wittgensteinian, would have pondered hard the nature of the war ‘games’ that preceded use of arms: games in which each ‘move’ was a crafted piece of language and (dis)information, known as ‘intelligence’ or ... (read more)
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