Adrienne Eberhard
Adrienne Eberhard’s latest collection, The Shape of the Wind, is forthcoming from Black Pepper. Agamemnon’s Poppies (2003) was awarded second place in the Anne Elder Prize, Jane, Lady Franklin (2004) was featured on PoeticA, and This Woman (2011) was shortlisted for the 2013 Tasmania Book Prize. She lives on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, south of Hobart, and is working on a new collection that is a series of poems/letters between Marie Antoinette and Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin, who sailed in Tasmanian waters in 1792–93.
Winter
Snow laced the lower slopesof the mountain today, treeshooked to filigrees of light,sky tethered to the mountain’s bulk,its table cloth of white.Possibility was everywhere,the embroidery of snow, illuminating.Out of the corners of our eyes we spiedour own footsteps like animal spoor,faintly articulated in the white blanket,a trail to chase, all day.
Adrienne Eberhard ... (read more)
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 as flowers, lie flat,unlike the ocean’s endle ... (read more)
Flower
(Montignac)
She sees the flowers are red flagslike pennants hauled up, heralding danger,hailing the world and its loverswith admonitions:watch out, watch out.
On long stalks they wobbleand wave, handkerchiefs flaringlong after the ship has left port,their scarlet hue a constancy,an accusation,each flower, proud,
a finger pointing,away, awayand beckoning,come back, come back.
At ... (read more)
Distance
(after Jordie Albiston’s ‘Cartography’)
What is the space between this hut and that mountainbut impenetrable black, and frosty cold.She is writing this at a table in the cabin,spinning thoughts like threads, as if they can hold
her boys tighter, pull the mountain in, with their boldtents blooming like flowers in the snow.Can thoughts, or mad desire, shift the worldslightly, tilt ... (read more)