Kevin Brophy
Kevin Brophy has had nine collections of poetry published, as well as works of fiction and collections of essays. He has received the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry and the Calibre Essay Prize. In 2015 he was poet in residence at the B.R. Whiting Library in Rome, and in 2019–20 he is poet in residence at the Keesing Studio in Paris.
Elizabeth Riddell quipped about Kevin Brophy’s first novel, Getting Away With It (Wildgrass, 1982), that he hadn’t! I do not recall anything else of her review, but must confess that it also replaced my own estimation of the book. With hindsight, it’s clear that the novel has too many attributes to be disqualified, however wittily. Furthermore, Brophy’s new novel, Visions, recovers the bes ... (read more)
Poetry, in ‘stilling things’, as Martin Heidegger suggested in 1950, is nevertheless always restlessly active. These six voices are six stills from a fast-moving history of poetry in Western Australia. They are evidence that poetry can provide moments we can enter into in suspended silence while experiencing that movement and agitation so essential to important poetry.
Ben Lerner, in The Hatr ... (read more)
If Peter Boyle’s new and selected, Towns in the Great Desert (which I reviewed in ABR, March 2014), was a tour de force of the imagination, and a book of stunningly strange and brilliant poetry, this next book, Ghostspeaking, surpasses it in ambition and virtuosity. Across nearly 400 pages, Boyle introduces us to eleven Spanish-speaking poets from Argentina, France, Spain, Cuba, Canada, and Puer ... (read more)
we know that the sun comes up when we pray,that it's here to bless us every day,
we know that communists boil childrento fertilise their socialist fields,
we know that Italy has the most beautifulsecretaries in the world,
we know that there are giant rats swimmingin the Tiber,
we know that the heads of Royal personagesrattle when they fall,
we know that drugs are merely chemicals,and ... (read more)
For Marianne J Boruch and David Dunlap
We walk past the ruined pastpasted to the Academy’s cloister walls,past broken Latin stones’ fractured inscriptions,one fragment reading ‘OVE IS’,and I know that though the sea is comingand volcanoes are not finished with us,crossing this garden in this courtyard in the eveningwith a sentry in a box by the iron gatewatching black-masked fun ... (read more)
You woke with a headacheand opened the bedroom window blind.You bent forward as morning light came in.It fell on your belly and breastsand your sleep maddened hair.I could hear the sickness in your voiceas you accepted a salad bowl to throw up inand two pills with breakfast.
The new sun tipped itself up over distant mountainsoutside the kitchen window and slapped colour on the housesacross the sl ... (read more)
This poem has not yet been writtenand before it is I want to say I respectthe President of the United States,the man himself and his office
and I respect what the peoplemean when they say Democracythough I do not know what thismight have to do with being armed
and having put these points like thisas plainly as possibleon the table here between usI can warn you I might be saying tomorrow
or perh ... (read more)
for Wolfgang and Birgit
I failed to sleep last night, I failed to have the dreamsthat would take me safe from one day into the next.
I failed to be brave, afraid of the train, its snout of steelpushing out of the dark into the station at San Pietro,
its sides towering over us blue and white and filthy with night.It hissed, cracked open, impatient, warm as a belly inside,
I was shaken as it too ... (read more)
I have never been good at violence. Not even at mild arguments. So when the brick came smashing through our bedroom window in the middle of the night,I leapt from our bed and screamed. Our children came running in, more worried and frightened by the noise I had made than by the brick or by the glass scattered on our floor. This is all history now. Well, not quite. As with all history, even when th ... (read more)