States of Poetry ACT

(Il Cimento dell’ Armonia e dell’ Inventione)
                    after Vivaldi
                                 & ...

Paul Munden has published five collections, most recently The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press, 2017) and Chromatic (UWA Publishing, 2017). He was reader for Stanley Kubr ...

The world is breaking
driving through the falling dark somewhere bombs are falling
and I want to show you where I came from
point to the purple hills and the darkening trees
the night condensing on the fields
But you are sleeping, or pretending to

The world is breaking
I would like to say that once this
ringed in valley was all the world and cuppe ...

I swim through obscure water to the far bank where
trees hunch searching reflections in muddy currents

I crawl beneath greening branches beside dark bracken
spiky cycads stare out at the people on the other side

They lie spread on sparsely grassed sand congregated
by this inland river beneath incongruous beach umbrellas

They stumble through shallows on ...

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
Henry Hill, Goodfellas

I am in a Martin Scorsese film – except I’m not
In 1972 I was in a bar with my gangster friends
having my gangster laughs and we were
Kings among men – ‘You’re a funny guy!’
I shouted we shouted guns sleeping restlessl ...

Adlubescence, n. Pleasure,
delight
           1.    April day in Canberra, fog in the morning
                  lifts, sunshine, moon
              &nb ...

Miranda Lello is a Canberra poet and performer whose début poetry collection, A Song, The World To Come, was published in March 2017 by Recent Work Press. It took thirty-five years to write, and Miranda launche ...

we write small poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –

all this to make sense of
the random moments
parading past our hearts
in chaos. instead

we should write poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –

< ...

             (first stanza after Rosemary Dobson’s Over the Frontier)

The pot I imagine
is always better
than the one
                I make.

But after all these years
my hands are learning
how to work cla ...

1        They know the subtler shades of green and where each one belongs;
2        and some reds:
          ochre, orange and something aching towards crimson –
          all in a single patch;
3      &nb ...