Paul Munden has published five collections, most recently The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press, 2017) and Chromatic (UWA Publishing, 2017). He was reader for Stanley Kubrick from 1988–98, and has been Director of the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) since 1994. He has worked as conference poet for the British Council and edited Feeling the Pressure: poetry and science of climate change (British Council, 2008). In 2015 he took up a position as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canberra, where he is also Program Manager for the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), running the annual Poetry on the Move festival. He is Associate Editor of Axon: Creative explorations and the literary journal, Meniscus, and co-editor with Nessa O’Mahony on Metamorphic: 21st century poets respond to Ovid (Recent Work Press, 2017).

Statement

'Having spent much of my life working for a UK organisation supporting other writers, I came to the University of Canberra partly to spend more time on my own writing, and I have found the University – together with the wider ACT poetry community – a wonderfully creative and supportive environment in which to work. Alongside experiments in prose poetry, I have focused increasingly on poetic form, particularly the sonnet (and new variants). I have always been interested in the relationship between writing and music, and a new interest in translation has led me to produce new English versions of the sonnets found in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons score – attributed to the composer himself. My aim is to include these and other poems in a hybrid book ‘interpreting’ the British violinist Nigel Kennedy.'

Paul Munden

Poems

What he overhears

The violin

The Four Seasons

With daily practice

'Road Closed'