Judith Beveridge

Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.

Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform

This week on the ABR Podcast we celebrate twenty years of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize with readings from six winners. We invited these poets to reflect on the prize and their winning poems. Hear fresh readings from Judith Beveridge, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Sara M. Saleh, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. The 2024 Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, closes on October 9.

Two poems in memory of Robert Adamson (1943-2022).

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 third of the poems Gray has chosen for Rain Towards Morning are these formal or semi-formal compositions, indicating that he wishes to showcase this aspect of his work. Fewer poems have been chosen from his free verse books Grass Script (1978), The Skylight (1983) and Afterimages (2002), arguably his best books.

I’ve come to walk along the jetty, watch the stingrays / glide around the pylons, their sides fanning and flaring / like the skirts of Spanish dancers, but there’s a large / dog tethered to a pole, idling on low growl, speed-smelling / the wind. Its eyes tell me it is used to the loneliness

We bent the camels’ legs back at the knees
and bound them with rope, then we tethered them
to a tree and left them in the scorching heat.
The whole camp aromatic with onion, cardamom ...

ABR asked a few colleagues and contributors to nominate some books that have beguiled them – might even speak to others – at this unusual time.

To celebrate the best books of 2018, Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser

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 ...