Original voices are always slippery to describe. The familiar weighing mechanisms don’t work very well when the body of work floats a little above the weighing pan, or darts around in it. As in dreams, a disturbing familiarity may envelop the work with an elusive scent. It is no different for poetry than for any other art: the mercurial alloy, or unforeseen offspring, astonish and perturb. They ... (read more)
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.
It is a curious thing, and not a little moving, to see writers celebrated for their work in other genres turn in later life with renewed vigour to poetry. David Malouf, like Clive James, has avowed a desire for poetry now, as the main form of writing his expression wants to take. Certainly, its brevity has a part in this, for the best of poems can happen, if fortunate, in minutes, not months, as M ... (read more)
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The appearance of a New and Selected Poems by a widely loved and admired poet has all the pleasures of a major retrospective, but viewed alone, without the clamour of a gallery event. It’s in the nature of retrospective to raise the banner of analysis-as-public-spectacle. What does this art mean to us, and how is it unique? The artist’s own words form part of the context for understanding the ... (read more)
There is a shimmering, ludic intelligence to this collection of poems, Philip Mead’s first since 1984. The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities. Opening any new work, the anticipation is acute: will I be changed by reading this, and if so, how? What might I think, feel, or recognise that I have not before?
The title and opening poem, as in many c ... (read more)
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Be our heart’s north,daybreak in our daughters’breath, be the radiancethat listensas we gather for the singingof the wood.
Here is night. Somewhere,to someone, fear is coming:dark calls out the humananimal. Somewhere,in someone, the animalruns forth.
By night the wood sings.In its radiance we findourselves altered.Somewhere in the nightour hearts settleand the breath alone keeps watch.
Judi ... (read more)
after the painting The grey parrot by Walter Deverell, National Gallery of Victoria
The far city must make itself knowneven here in the sitting room andbarred by winter branches. The skyline
with its towers square as pillarsbuilt of blocks could be hereas much as then and there and is
in any case beyond hearing.Long withdrawn from the citythat oversees life to a home
where rapt stillness is a ... (read more)
(Italian, c.17th; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
Life breathes in this painting like a child pretending not to be awake,
or a skink metamorphosed to a stone but for the flutter in its flank.
You have to lean and listen for the heart behind the shining paint,
the lips half-open, and the glittering eye.
Velvet of the night. A bald parrot on a parapet watches to the east.
Ships listing on ... (read more)
for Sophie
You are seething; I am worried.We have read the Greek myths.
... (read more)