There could be someone, there, walking through a forest – upright or slightly bending – gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms, but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down through the air to this someone, who is not ‘someone’ to insects, but at most, might be a chemical, electrical or visual site; there could be someone
over there, making noise ... (read more)
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.
We can walk into a room not knowing.It doesn’t happen every time.
A white room can be painted to be pure.I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.
But it doesn’t have to be.We can walk into a room
not knowing whether,or when, or even that.
Thatcan be the hardest room.
Only you will know.First there is the walking.
The floor, a chair or two.The posters
of visionsof someone else’s visi ... (read more)
i.Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!A black photowhere the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.Never in all historywas such a portent visiblewithout a guiding star.
ii.Algorithms tinker at the corners of my life.One tells me what I need to know.One tells me what I want.No, I say, not furniture, not the nearest death.I sense that they are holding back.Turn around, slowly: I want to s ... (read more)
Change Machine is an exceptionally strong third collection. To the extent that a schematic of thesis–antithesis– synthesis applies to poets’ books, this one both exceeds and incorporates the work that came before.
Intriguingly, the title poem seems a late addition, citing the pandemic in three clipped lines, borne on the shoulders of two innocuous words, should and but:
I’m broke. And ... (read more)
In a letter to a friend, American poet James Wright reflected on the meaning of a Selected Poems for a peer he considered undervalued: ‘It shows that defeat, though imminent for all of us, is not inevitable.’ He quoted Stanley Kunitz, whose Selected was belatedly in press: ‘it would be sweet, I’ll grant, after all these years to pop up from underground … The only ones who survive … are ... (read more)
Original voices are always slippery to describe. The familiar weighing mechanisms don’t work very well when the body of work floats a little above the weighing pan, or darts around in it. As in dreams, a disturbing familiarity may envelop the work with an elusive scent. It is no different for poetry than for any other art: the mercurial alloy, or unforeseen offspring, astonish and perturb. They ... (read more)
It is a curious thing, and not a little moving, to see writers celebrated for their work in other genres turn in later life with renewed vigour to poetry. David Malouf, like Clive James, has avowed a desire for poetry now, as the main form of writing his expression wants to take. Certainly, its brevity has a part in this, for the best of poems can happen, if fortunate, in minutes, not months, as M ... (read more)
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The appearance of a New and Selected Poems by a widely loved and admired poet has all the pleasures of a major retrospective, but viewed alone, without the clamour of a gallery event. It’s in the nature of retrospective to raise the banner of analysis-as-public-spectacle. What does this art mean to us, and how is it unique? The artist’s own words form part of the context for understanding the ... (read more)
There is a shimmering, ludic intelligence to this collection of poems, Philip Mead’s first since 1984. The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities. Opening any new work, the anticipation is acute: will I be changed by reading this, and if so, how? What might I think, feel, or recognise that I have not before?
The title and opening poem, as in many c ... (read more)