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States of Poetry SA

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. To read ABR Arts articles in full, subscribe to ABR or take out an ABR Arts subscription. Both packages give full access to our arts reviews the moment they are published online and to our extensive arts archive.

Meanwhile, the ABR Arts e-newsletter, published every second Tuesday, will keep you up-to-date as to our recent arts reviews.

 


Recent reviews

Steve Brock published his first collection of poetry The Night is a Dying Dog (Wakefield Press) in 2007, and received a grant from Arts South Australia for the completion of ...

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Steve Brock began writing in the shadow of the New York school, but in ‘dreaming with Ted Berrigan’ – ‘I can’t remember if he said anything’ – might be saying goodbye to those earlier cool dudes and already a ...

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Thom Sullivan reads his poem 'Suburban Panopticon' which features in the 2016 SA anthology.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Jill Jones reads two poems, 'Memory Lapses and Clues, or Don't Forget to Remember' and 'Bent', which both feature in the 2016 South Australian anthology.

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for Lee Harwood

 

Softly solarised and parallel
two lines echo each other, glow slightly,
in a space that is nowhere

                               #

        ...

Octopus

Quick across the twilight road,
the eight legs of the cat.

 

Flood

Water corrects the earth
to flatness, patching fields with sky.

 

Alarm

Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days.

 

Window

The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes.

 

Should the unique serve to typify?
Have they been ill-used? To what purpose?

 

Asian Couple

                    The Asian couple.
I am inclined to think Chinese –
mostly on the basis of size,
but not Japanese (the ...

I am history now
in the scales, the age of sounds

I make sense then drop it
it gets dirty, it breaks
the ants carry it

I am bent at the switch
my tapes of the archive
decay, loops stutter
glitch arias

I am bent at the floor
facts roll under the chair
little dust songs
or songs outside
the parrots know

and I am sti ...

Fitness: fact, fiction
or fantasy? – among things
meant. Parachutes

open like fuchsias,
picnic hampers
of kittens float quietly

down, as peaks
push through
resplendent mists.

Your sense
falls upward
like helium or blinds,

now it's precisely
subtitled, you realise –
as the first tentative

...

The do-it-yourself piano isn't
kicked to matchwood, and you take
this for affirmation. When we
work out how to switch off
Bob Dylan, your plangent homemades
will go unaccompanied, no longer
sought like an injury lost in the mists
of Hansard. People suggest topics

they won't be using, and this is
more like an archive sneeze
than what yesteryea ...