Kate Middleton
Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009 and Ephemeral Waters (Giramondo, 2013), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s award in 2014. From September 2011-September 2012 she was the inaugural Sydney City Poet.
The dawn is only a thought.
The fulcrum on which we rest our newsprint, our toothless fingerprints, our balmy Paxil days.
Only a thought of the windy, dwindling kind.
Wake to urgent messages, to the waltz of hours crisp and fragile as thin pastry. To roulette of lightning yes. Of arid no.
Kate Middleton ... (read more)
The storm blows you back its funnel ardent its wide hungry eyeIts tongue croons youonto flatline of prairie
When poppies drowsed youred breath drewgravity into your limbs:you yearned for tall grassa narrow tunnelof consciousness brainheart sha ... (read more)
Cento after Peter Steele
Is this not running wild?Silk-white ashes of dream and filmnerve into drama −into darkness and its minotaur
In fact, we are a pack of jokerscloaked but coldtaking to change as salamanderswere once thought to take to fire
Yes, such silk-white ashes– their yield, their plenitude –may as well be rained togetherLove’s cost in a seared world ... (read more)
Jennifer Maiden has for a long time been one of Australia’s most politically engaged poets, a commentator on the local scene and the international set alike. With her new volume, Liquid Nitrogen, Maiden continues on from her previous books Friendly Fire (2005) and Pirate Rain (2010), with more poems centred on the journalist George Jeffreys, and further poetic conversations between Hillary Clint ... (read more)
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With his new volume of poetry, Barry Hill has set himself the challenge of writing a book focused on the visual art of the recently deceased Lucian Freud without, excepting the cover image, accompanying reproductions of the paintings to which he responds. Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud is a collection of ekphrastic poems born out of the obsessive return to a body of painting that spanned mu ... (read more)
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Bricks, knowledge, gravity
‘I just read a history of bricks.’
We learn about the ways our teachers have influenced us over many years. As an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne, I took every class taught by Professor Peter Steele SJ. More than a decade after I first sat in his office, and only days after his death, I recall a statement he made almost as an as ... (read more)
Dan Disney’s début collection, and then when the, is a slim volume infused with irreverent outings in philosophy and place. Just as the opening poem places its speaker in a philosophy class, philosophers offer constant points of reference. Disney reformulates such well-worn dicta as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum with verve, as in the poem ‘Towards a unifying theory of non-coincidence’, in w ... (read more)