Poem
The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine
In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.
... (read more)There is no God, I was made in this man’s image:
those slate-dark eyes of his are mine,
the dented bridge of our his-my nose.
I laugh with his rasping cackle in me.
I walk with his stooping, trudging gait,
swearing his ‘Jesus bloody Christ’
in a sudden fist-curl of temper.
My right ear points like a flesh-antenna as his does,
and being my father I bear his name.
Haphazardries of kin passed on from birth
that to see him wizened on his cancer bed,
his insides turned to water,
... (read more)for Craig Sherborne
‘Grief wrongs us so.’
Douglas Dunn
To the sea we bear our fathers in state –
or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.
Surf mild as receding tides,
we slump in dunes with our burdens,
... (read more)This must be a page from The Manual
For the Instructing of Humanity,
Showing the improvement of the Social Order
By the avoidance of personal identification
With Suffering, a turning-away to private Sanity.
... (read more)The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher
who begets the rainbow bee-eater
who begets the firetailed finch
who begets the forty-spotted pardalote
who begets the damsel fly
who begets the jewelled beetle
who begets a pentangle of reflected light
that falls on a colony of dust mites
... (read more)(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)
Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.
Nobody answers him.
She’s got dark hair that stops
just above her shoulders. Turns up at the ends.
She’s very slim, Max says.
He’s talking to Hamid
about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,
whom he is hoping to meet
somewhere south of Baghdad.
... (read more)Poem of the Week - 'Man on the Moon' by Stephen Edgar (2005 ABR Poetry Prize winner)
In ABR's seventh 'Poem of the Week' Stephen Edgar discusses and reads his poem 'Man on the Moon'.
... (read more)This six a.m. moment
in the cool-blue cool
of early morning
is not eternal.
Oliver Dennis reviews ‘In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children’ by Philip Hammial ‘Home Town Burial’ by Martin R. Johnson and ‘Loneliness’ by Maurice Strandgard
Here are three volumes that offer differing responses to a world characterised by injustice, brutality and personal hardship. Far and away the most distinctive (and demanding) of these is Philip Hammial’s sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children.
... (read more)