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.
In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a mat ... (read more)
As ifthe black windowat the solitary passfrom I to this (or you or now)could let a human mindslip through the glassonce,let’s practise seeing water,looking hard at the harbour,that detritus of wornmussel shells, rock ledgesgraffitiedwith an ecstasyof lichen, waveswriting out the riddlesof harmonics,breath heldfor a momentas Elizabeth Bishopin her posthumous voicesays cold dark deep and absolutel ... (read more)
To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce that airless element, the body breathing calm within its envelope of gas …
Morning took me to the jetty. I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared.
... (read more)
J.S. Harry and her lapin alter ego, Peter Henry Lepus, would assuredly have had ‘words to say’ about the war in Ukraine and its manufacture by a group of human beings. Peter, a Wittgensteinian, would have pondered hard the nature of the war ‘games’ that preceded use of arms: games in which each ‘move’ was a crafted piece of language and (dis)information, known as ‘intelligence’ or ... (read more)
There could be someone, there, walking through a forest – upright or slightly bending – gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms, but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down through the air to this someone, who is not ‘someone’ to insects, but at most, might be a chemical, electrical or visual site; there could be someone
over there, making noise ... (read more)
We can walk into a room not knowing.It doesn’t happen every time.
A white room can be painted to be pure.I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.
But it doesn’t have to be.We can walk into a room
not knowing whether,or when, or even that.
Thatcan be the hardest room.
Only you will know.First there is the walking.
The floor, a chair or two.The posters
of visionsof someone else’s visi ... (read more)
i.Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!A black photowhere the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.Never in all historywas such a portent visiblewithout a guiding star.
ii.Algorithms tinker at the corners of my life.One tells me what I need to know.One tells me what I want.No, I say, not furniture, not the nearest death.I sense that they are holding back.Turn around, slowly: I want to s ... (read more)
Change Machine is an exceptionally strong third collection. To the extent that a schematic of thesis–antithesis– synthesis applies to poets’ books, this one both exceeds and incorporates the work that came before.
Intriguingly, the title poem seems a late addition, citing the pandemic in three clipped lines, borne on the shoulders of two innocuous words, should and but:
I’m broke. And ... (read more)
In a letter to a friend, American poet James Wright reflected on the meaning of a Selected Poems for a peer he considered undervalued: ‘It shows that defeat, though imminent for all of us, is not inevitable.’ He quoted Stanley Kunitz, whose Selected was belatedly in press: ‘it would be sweet, I’ll grant, after all these years to pop up from underground … The only ones who survive … are ... (read more)