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Nathan Shepherdson

Anders Villani reviews two new poetry collections

Anders Villani
Sunday, 24 September 2023

'Poems reawaken in us,’ writes James Longenbach, ‘the pleasure of the unintelligibility of the world.’ They do so via ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’: disjunctive strategies that work, for Longenbach, to ‘resist our intelligence almost successfully’. What ‘almost’ means here is, of course, a matter of taste – and style. Nonetheless, this Romantic mandate – that poems achieve clarity by integrating opacity – invites a question fundamental to poetics: how much resistance is too much, or not enough?

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Nathan Shepherdson reads his poem 'the black hand of Badia Elmi' which features in the 2016 Queensland anthology.

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ironing the crease into her lung with your breath
the six words in end steam over blue charcoal in her eye

your hands arrive in separate envelopes on different days
and they are addressed to each other

even the earth in its eyedropper is not medicine to our mouths
it's the milk dispensed through holes in a flute that keeps us alive

Mr & Mrs Emeritus ...

the black hand of Badia Elmi corrected and cropped

Nathan Shepherdson


Recording