Judith Beveridge
Judith Beveridge won the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her latest poetry publications are Devadatta’s Poems and Hook and Eye, which was published by George Braziller for the US market. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Sydney.
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Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exitquickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presentingonly a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
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There’s a sleechy smell here, grey frogs on the bank like slurried earth, rotund toads hopping across lily pads, grunting like sultans trying out cushions. Fish mouth the surface with so many unsinkable O’s, and the larval
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According to his author’s note, Rain Towards Morning is ‘a definitive book’ of the poems Robert Gray wishes to preserve. Nameless Earth (Carcanet, 2006) is the most generously represented of Gray’s previous eight books. This is followed by his mid-career volume Piano (1988) in which he first began to publish a range of poetry with tight rhyme schemes and controlled rhythms. More than a thi ... (read more)
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Grennan sucks in air along his gums and yellsagain to Davey who is filling the troughof the gunwhale with scrabbling crabs. Far offlightning slips down the sky like a forkfulof buttered sea-worms. The rain works fastcutting with decisive precision acrossthe sea. Grennan pulls in squid, then seversthe slimy cordage of the tentacles, throwsone at Davey who laughs; his voice hard, sharpas a scuttling ... (read more)
Stephen Edgar’s fifth volume, Lost in the Foreground, is a book of marvels, both technically and in the elegant, magisterial reach of its content. He is wonderfully inventive, and his complex rhyme schemes and forms are achieved with such precision and finesse that one can only conjecture as to how long each piece must have taken to become so lovingly and artfully realised.
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The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a starfrom the river, and a lyrebird was opening the day,volunteering to be a bell. We were watching an egret
prod at the nutrient dark, its beak one tine of a forkcatching what floats, just as the sun began crackingthe trees awake. The bird’s song reached us, then it
sharded into the river’s cold glass. You thought youheard it again in the edd ... (read more)
from Suddhodana’s Poems
We bent the camels’ legs back at the kneesand bound them with rope, then we tethered themto a tree and left them in the scorching heat.The whole camp aromatic with onion, cardamom,tamarind, cumin – even the dusk seemed spreadwith the crimson marinade we’d mixed for the basting.We could almost taste the slender straps we’d soonlift from the bones, camel meat sweet ... (read more)