States of Poetry - Poems

'Le Grand Canal' by Christiane Conésa-Bostock | States of Poetry Tasmania - Series Two

States of Poetry - Poems

'Le Grand Canal' by Christiane Conésa-Bostock | States of Poetry Tasmania - Series Two

Claude Monet, 1908

Monsieur Monet has a new lover.
She calls at two every afternoon
and invites him to stay a few hours.
Worshipped by Whistler, Boudin and Signac
Santa Maria della Salute is not like the others.

From the steps of the Palazzo Barbaro
wrapped in a bestowed fur coat
he impregnates the domes of his mistress
with a nacreous afterglow. He washes her feet
with glistening tufts of pink, blue and gold.

At dusk, when he is spent
he takes his wife Alice in a gondola
to the famous Piazza San Marco
where they may be photographed
with a kit of pigeons.

Christiane Conésa-Bostock

Christiane Conésa-Bostock

Christiane Conésa-Bostock was born in Lyon, France and has lived in Hobart since the 1970s. Christiane, along with The Grove Road Poets (Karen Knight, Liz Mc Quilkin, Liz Winfield, and Megan Schaffner), won First Prize in the Fellowship of Australian Writers competition in 2010 with their book Of Things being Various which was published in 2011.Christiane’s solo poetry collection De passage de France en Tasmanie was published in 2011. Her poems, essays, and stories have explored the migration experience. She has been published online, in literary reviews and books in France, Australia, the United States, and Algeria. She has read her poems at various venues in Australia and in Paris. She is presently working on a collection of poems based on Claude Monet’s paintings.