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Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.

'Samara's Wrought Iron Butterfly' by Judith Bishop

March 2005, no. 269 • 01 April 2005
I have come to the city of Samara a second time, to visit a Russian friend I first met in St Louis. The city lies 1000 kilometres south-east of Moscow, and stands at the confluence of two wide rivers, the Volga and the Samara. Founded in 1586 as a small fortress, it now has more than one million inhabitants. The Samara region, rich in oil and minerals, is reputed to have the highest per capita wea ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews ‘The New Arcadia’ by John Kinsella

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277 • 01 December 2004
In the opening poem of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd newly dispossessed of his farm by a soldier returning from war exclaims: ‘There’s so much trouble everywhere these days. / I was trying to drive my goats along the path / And one of them I could hardly get to follow; Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor …’ (trans. David Ferry). More than 600 years later, Poussin’s painting ... (read more)

Judith Bishop on winning the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize

April 2006, no. 280 • 01 April 2006
Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on oth ... (read more)

'Icarus in C' by Judith Bishop

June 2008, no. 302 • 01 June 2008
But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods. Hölderlin Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have set down in a hangar. The children stare at us. Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know, now we fly from land to land seeking comfort, what it takes to cure lack once and for all. Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist to any bloomin ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews 'Algorithmic Intimacy: The digital revolution in personal relationships' by Anthony Elliott

December 2023, no. 460 • 27 November 2023
In May 2021, scientists at Woebot Health, a US-based artificial intelligence company, published a paper titled ‘Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established with a Digital Conversational Agent’. Reading it back then, I felt like a door had suddenly opened from nowhere. But not just any door: this one led directly to a passage into human inner life and one of its most intimate dimensions: the natu ... (read more)

'Arrival' a poem by Judith Bishop

November 2009, no. 316 • 01 November 2009
Where the mind comes from, where it goes, when the moon rose, where among the stars the light was seen as you were born: if it glistened in the tracks stamped on leaves across the park where we walked the early afternoon, alert, listening up, hearing how the plovers pipe back and forth across the grass … ... (read more)

Judith Bishop reviews 'Alcatraz', edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

September 2023, no. 457 • 27 August 2023
Alcatraz is an international anthology of prose poems which builds on the success of previous collaborations between the artist Phil Day and poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington. Contributors include many outstanding poets from the United States (twenty-eight), the United Kingdom (ten), and Australia (thirteen), with smaller numbers of poets from India, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, V ... (read more)
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