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Sarah Holland-Batt
Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Aria and The Hazards (UQP), and a forthcoming volume of essays on contemporary poetry, Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry (UQP, 2021). She is the recipient of a number of honours, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and a Sydney Myer Creative Fellowship. As of 2021, she is the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, and works as a Professor at QUT.
In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchairgarlanded by summer hibiscuslike a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.A flowering wreath buzzes around his head –passionate red. He holds the gift of deathin his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black.He has been waiting seventeen years to open itand is impatient. When I ask how he ismy father cries. His crying comes as a visitation,the body squ ... (read more)
To hell with what you think of me.I’ve started drinking martinis at three.I wake, I walk, I write, I sleep.I snooze the alarm. I doze. I read.Sometimes I listen to Carmen McRaeand pity you an inch. Not often.Mostly I think about who’ll be nextnow you’re gone. I stay out extravagantly late.I buy myself a new coat, oysters, peonies.I take long baths with a flute of champagne.In bars, I sip whi ... (read more)
As my plane drops down in turbulence
I think of you and of Salt Lake City,
I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes
and of Omaha and of adamant plains.
I think of all the places
I have never been: Caracas,
La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way
our bodies puzzled together in that room
over pine woods where night deer
passed in the snow, their lonesome
inscrutable tracks sluicing
in th ... (read more)
Sylvia Plath wrote her last letter to the American psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher a week prior to her suicide on 11 February 1963. In it, Plath castigates herself for being guilty of ‘Idolatrous love’, a concept she drew from psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. ‘I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself,’ Plath writes, identifying the subsumption of her ego ... (read more)
What are the limits of maternal love? How do children fare in its absence? Is mothering a socialised behaviour or a biological impulse? These are the questions Alice Nelson pursues in her second novel, The Children’s House, which draws its title from the name given to the separate quarters alloted to children in the communal child-rearing characteristic of life in kibbutzim in Israel. The idea u ... (read more)
‘When I was younger even the appearance of “I” on the page made me feel a bit ill,’ Zadie Smith confesses in her new book of essays, Feel Free. Shades of this chariness about the personal pronoun still persist in her non-fiction today, which is markedly self-effacing. From the outset, Smith repeatedly attempts to ditch the mantle of authority: ‘I have no real qualifications to write as I ... (read more)
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I.
You tilt lapis to your lip –a day light as wicker.
By the water, bullrushes bowinto sailboat blue, lace-necked
egrets fossick and pick,and the elements rearrange
a goliath heron's skull to mud.Up on the embankment
a crouching child scratcheshis name into a temple wall.
II.
Ultramarine, lapis lazuli—today it seems possible to boil
queens to bone and paint,unlike our childhood saints
... (read more)