Judith Beveridge
This week on the ABR Podcast we celebrate twenty years of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize with readings from six winners. We invited these poets to reflect on the prize and their winning poems. Hear fresh readings from Judith Beveridge, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Sara M. Saleh, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. The 2024 Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, closes on October 9.
... (read more)Two poems for Robert Adamson (1943-2022)
Two poems in memory of Robert Adamson (1943-2022).
... (read more)Judith Beveridge reviews 'Rain Towards Morning: Selected poems and drawings' by Robert Gray
According to his author’s note, Rain Towards Morning is ‘a definitive book’ of the poems Robert Gray wishes to preserve. Nameless Earth (Carcanet, 2006) is the most generously represented of Gray’s previous eight books. This is followed by his mid-career volume Piano (1988) in which he first began to publish a range of poetry with tight rhyme schemes and controlled rhythms. More than a third of the poems Gray has chosen for Rain Towards Morning are these formal or semi-formal compositions, indicating that he wishes to showcase this aspect of his work. Fewer poems have been chosen from his free verse books Grass Script (1978), The Skylight (1983) and Afterimages (2002), arguably his best books.
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I’ve come to walk along the jetty, watch the stingrays / glide around the pylons, their sides fanning and flaring / like the skirts of Spanish dancers, but there’s a large / dog tethered to a pole, idling on low growl, speed-smelling / the wind. Its eyes tell me it is used to the loneliness
... (read more)We bent the camels’ legs back at the knees
and bound them with rope, then we tethered them
to a tree and left them in the scorching heat.
The whole camp aromatic with onion, cardamom ...
ABR asked a few colleagues and contributors to nominate some books that have beguiled them – might even speak to others – at this unusual time.
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To celebrate the best books of 2018, Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser
... (read more)Judith Bishop reviews 'Sun Music: New and selected poems' by Judith Beveridge
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 ...
... (read more)ending on a line by John Burnside
No one on the boats, just cats – thin, furtive.
There’s the blown cry of terns and the wheedling
embarkations of crows, but you will not slip
Judith Beveridge reviews 'Creating Poetry' by Ron Pretty
This updated and revised edition of Creating Poetry – first published by Edward Arnold in 1987, and then by Five Islands Press in 2001 – is one of few poetry guidebooks written by an Australian poet. One of its pleasing features is that it uses the work of Australian poets, including John Tranter, Geoff Page, Kevin Brophy, Meredith Wattison, Judith Wrig ...