Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

States of Poetry 2016

Strange, that there are sequences
              we live as cinema, if I looked
over my shoulder
I might recognise the front wall
of my bedroom
               opened out towards the camera,

my furniture as hollow
as a stage p ...

Flower

(Montignac)

 

She sees the flowers are red flags
like pennants hauled up, heralding danger,
hailing the world and its lovers
with admonitions:
watch out, watch out.

On long stalks they wobble
and wave, handkerchiefs flaring
long after the ship has left port,
their scarlet hue a constancy, ...

Voyaging

 

I          Marie Antoinette, imprisoned in Paris in 1791,
           to Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin,
           departing from Brest on d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition

Your breasts, small ...

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.

... (read more)

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 ...

In this episode of the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry Podcast, state editor Felicity Plunkett introduces the 2016 Queensland poets: Nathan Shepherdson, Ellen van Neerven, Lionel Forgarty, MTC Cronin, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Stuart Barnes.

... (read more)

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 ...

Sarah Holland-Batt was born in Southport, Queensland, and grew up in Australia and the United States. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. ... (read more)