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Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton - new smaller

Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections F ...

All writers need good bookshelves, but the poet, perhaps more than any other writer, is charged with the involuntary dispensation and relentless accumulation of reading material. This is partly due to the proclivities of the producers and partly due to the characteristics of the form itself. As the notable cultural critic Pierre Bourdieu remarked, poetry's effects d ...

Read the six shortlisted poems in the 2015 Porter Prize. ... (read more)

Cento after Peter Steele

Is this not running wild?
Silk-white ashes of dream and film
nerve into drama −
into darkness and its minotaur

... (read more)

‘As if cuffed by the ear, the Colorado river pulled me onward.’ The current that seized Kate Middleton can be felt throughout Ephemeral Waters, as she takes us from the headwaters of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, over the Hoover Dam, until the great river, all its water plundered along the way, expires a hundred miles from the sea. The fate that the ‘mighty Murray’ has barely avoided is accepted for the Colorado, with a few crocodile tears, because all the water stays in the United States, while the dried up ex-river is in Mexico.

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Jennifer Maiden has for a long time been one of Australia’s most politically engaged poets, a commentator on the local scene and the international set alike. With her new volume, Liquid Nitrogen, Maiden continues on from her previous books Friendly Fire (2005) and Pirate Rain (2010), with more poems centred on the journalist George Jeffreys, and further poetic conversations between Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as new partnerships between Kevin Rudd and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Julia Gillard and Aneurin Bevan. These poems fold into a volume that also includes more of Maiden’s ‘diary poems’ and a number of smaller, non-sequential poems that nonetheless match the volume’s tone and may well contain the seeds of Maiden’s next book. The liquid nitrogen of the title appears first in George Jeffreys’s waking, and later in the poem ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Liquid Nitrogen’. Such echoes recur as Liquid Nitrogen conducts conversations not just within its probing poems, but also across the collection as a whole. The book is at once political and intimate, full of the real world and marked by the oneiric tone of conversations that cross the threshold of death.

... (read more)
'Balcony 2', a new poem by Kate Middleton. ... (read more)

With his new volume of poetry, Barry Hill has set himself the challenge of writing a book focused on the visual art of the recently deceased Lucian Freud without, excepting the cover image, accompanying reproductions of the paintings to which he responds. Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud is a collection of ekphrastic poems born out of the obsessive return to a body of painting that spanned much of the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.

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after Tom Roberts

 

Holding the ram in awkward embrace,
he comprehends gravity while watching
the shearers charge through their task.

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Bricks, knowledge, gravity

 

‘I just read a history of bricks.’

 

We learn about the ways our teachers have influenced us over many years. As an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne, I took every class taught by Professor Peter Steele SJ. More than a decade after I first ...

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