‘I spiritualogic grin, in’
Bad Brains
Roadkill shock rocks the pink and grey’sgalah world, this is not wordplay, or deathpuns,until the sun goes down, shocker, blood-letter,hit and run make-over, splatterfest and gore show,a ‘laugh-a minute’ partner wandering about in a daze,
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John Kinsella
John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His most recent publications include the novel Lucida Intervalla (UWA Publishing 2018), Open Door (UWA Publishing, 2018); On the Outskirts (UQP, 2017), and Drowning in Wheat: Selected poems (Picador, 2016). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of The Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.
When David Brooks’s last volume of poetry, Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried particular weight and fascination as his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which, for some of us, was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved out of fault-lines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, afte ... (read more)
And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:The sun with rays, directly darting down,Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:The two beneath the distant poles, complainOf endless winter, and perpetual rain. Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates holdThe temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
Ovid via John Dryden*
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My father is in his last hoursand I stand beside the statue I don’t want to pull down, have my photo taken. To take a photo. Or its pastparticiple. I am thinking of studentswho almost worship the poet,   ... (read more)
When Petrus Borel led Victor Hugo’s private ‘claque’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himse ... (read more)
A couple of months ago, driving with my daughter just outside the wheat-belt town of York, Western Australia, we came across a ‘28’ parrot that had just been struck by a car. I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter held it on the back seat until we could get home. Having been bitten numerous times by those ‘strong and hooked’ beaks, I warned her to be wary. But the parrot – a sp ... (read more)
(i)
What remains barely the weather report: sentencing labours of history
against all beginnings, the maples
leafless, the houses barely porous.
(ii)
I ride roads I am not familiar with,
a figure of speech, chrome strips
between windows. To the south,
burial mounds. Resolution
deep and simpatico. Northwards:
the lake effect, the snow plough.
(iii)
Deer go down to ... (read more)
IThis place we live is termed ‘rural’or ‘countryside’ by arrangementwith or of the planters of grains,the breeders of animals forslaughter, by conservative vote.
IIBut we’re entangled among stalksof wild oats, amidst firebreaks,trying to coax that native bushback to have its say, to undothe rural we are entrenched in.
IIII always think of you when I’mtroubled by my presence – the r ... (read more)
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