for Anne Brumley
Amid crustless sandwichesthe talk is all of fat and fat- studies: at your conferenceyou’ll talk of Jonson, portly
and unfashionable, whowas painted fat, ridiculed fat, and, we might infer, ... (read more)
Kate Middleton
Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009 and Ephemeral Waters (Giramondo, 2013), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s award in 2014. From September 2011-September 2012 she was the inaugural Sydney City Poet.
Sometime late morning it begins, a root of something that only as it grows do you recognise as pain. You have had coffee, as you do every morning, and now you feel the kind of heaviness that sends you to lie down. At home, the friend who is staying with you, whom you half invited and who may have misinterpreted your keenness for company, notes your early return and approves of your plan to retreat ... (read more)
At primary school we were shown a video warning children not to get into strangers’ cars. We were told to note the places with Safety House stickers on the way home. I remember wondering if, on being pursued, I’d be able to run all the way to the nearest one. Every so often, we heard about a kidnapping on the news, so we took these warnings seriously.
Sonya Hartnett’s novel Of a Boy, writte ... (read more)
In black chalk the beastbrusques forward Silence Rubenshas stopped his mouthwith a single line He is alreadyawed by the denhe will find himself in even nowas his mane curls into wispof emptiness A study on paper
But there in white chalk the grimpose brightensinto recognition smudged nosebent toward the scentof viewer &nb ... (read more)
Cut out a sixth of the heart.At a day old—furless,close-eyed, resembling nothingso much as an infant's thumb—he can survive it.The mouse can regrow that missing partin three short weeks.
Aesop knew it:to be mouse-heartedis as good as wearingthe swagger of lion.
His heartperhaps the size of a Lilliputian walnut.Barely a mouse, alreadyripped apart.He does not waitfor a Godhand to put him back ... (read more)
The ‘greate fyshe’, terriblecolossus, dark cathedral of days and nights, arrestslost Jonah in his flight. Three
days and nights spentin wet earnest prayer, dread &nbs ... (read more)
The dawn is only a thought.
The fulcrum on which we rest our newsprint, our toothless fingerprints, our balmy Paxil days.
Only a thought of the windy, dwindling kind.
Wake to urgent messages, to the waltz of hours crisp and fragile as thin pastry. To roulette of lightning yes. Of arid no.
Kate Middleton ... (read more)
The storm blows you back its funnel ardent its wide hungry eyeIts tongue croons youonto flatline of prairie
When poppies drowsed youred breath drewgravity into your limbs:you yearned for tall grassa narrow tunnelof consciousness brainheart sha ... (read more)
Cento after Peter Steele
Is this not running wild?Silk-white ashes of dream and filmnerve into drama −into darkness and its minotaur
In fact, we are a pack of jokerscloaked but coldtaking to change as salamanderswere once thought to take to fire
Yes, such silk-white ashes– their yield, their plenitude –may as well be rained togetherLove’s cost in a seared world ... (read more)
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 Clint ... (read more)