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Michael Farrell
Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Recent books include Family Trees and I Love Poetry (both published by Giramondo), the scholarly Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan), and, as editor, Ashbery Mode (TinFish), an Australian tribute to John Ashbery. Born in Bombala, NSW, in 1965, Michael has lived in Melbourne since 1990.
the gardens dyed silver. finally he was
less keen like an eaten bird, it wasnt my thing
the path diverged off course to a camp.
you were willing to grow a pomegranate inside.
here they were gods people with their quiet domestics,
the redheads were nicer however. the pram, was full with a baby,
‘dreaming’ of white museums. & white art.
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Mid-career reinvention is an exciting thing. Ken Bolton’s poem ‘Outdoor Pig-Keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Farming Pigs’, in Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2009, was the most surprising poem in the book. Where were the friends, artists and cafés? Where were the small ironies? A larger irony was at work. Bolton’s new book, The Circus, is something else again: a wry, s ... (read more)
In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applie ... (read more)
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The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious ... (read more)
The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious ... (read more)
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We bring the horses back to their own fields because we likeTo see them among purple hay as if they signify black seedsA hoof can break any kind of feeling along a dramatic stretchThe gate is where I go to then proclaim my woes to his streetAnd ask him pointed questions like I’m in the Roman SenateImagine me among the morning glory wretched ’n’ botheredBut I should listen to my cornflake box ... (read more)
John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives is written at an intersection between experimental fiction, biography, and poetry. It inherits aspects of earlier works, such as preoccupations with sex and France. As the title indicates, it narrates mini-biographies of famous writers – Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Stephen (Woolf), André Breton, and Mina Loy – and one painter – Pablo Picasso – with interludes ... (read more)