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Paul Hetherington

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Paul Hetherington reads 'Gap' and 'River' which feature in the 2016 ACT anthology.

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for TAW
(from 'Paintings')

This black dress
is also a painting –
it hangs on a wall
where light holds it close.
It's a doorway to places
no-one quite knows;
that bloom and rain
with extravagant vistas.

We've sometimes entered
into the painting
dipping dark hats,
watching children
riding down lanes

'Dwelling' by Paul Hetherington | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

Paul Hetherington
Monday, 22 February 2016

Every morning, with an authority
of clinging, earthy foundations
a house sat in air.
Inside someone was singing an aria
about how love inflects its failings
and a woman, absorbed in her toilette
considered how pained words work
the world awry, even as air fills with song.
Outside a man hammered boards
to make a dwelling; crows sat on a wire
as i ...

'Eyes' by Paul Hetherington | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

Paul Hetherington
Monday, 22 February 2016

for BL
(from 'Paintings')

 

A hundred eyes
examine me like an insect,
red and yellow like fear.
What walks about me
in dirty boots, holding my ideas
ridiculous? Whose face
visits restless nights,
threatening to blank my dreams ...

'Gap' by Paul Hetherington | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

Paul Hetherington
Monday, 22 February 2016

A gap opened every evening
emitting a panting – as soft as darkness,
or stray dog at exhaustion's end.
Unsettling, like a straggly bird,
it dropped dark feathers
of prickling desire into the room.
It knew the edges of solitude
like the blue glacier's encrusted ice,
and morphed into a clouded mirror
on which each searching glance stuck fast.

'River' by Paul Hetherington | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

Paul Hetherington
Monday, 22 February 2016

There was never an explanation
as to why he walked into the river,
took hold of a log
and floated away.
They found letters
but the love he expressed
in sometimes obsessive detail
was no explanation –
except, the coroner declared
that perhaps it indicated
'a lack of a grasp', etc.
Someone who saw him pass by
said that he was waterlogg ...

About Paul Hetherington | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

Australian Book Review
Monday, 22 February 2016


Paul HetheringtonPaul Hetherington recently returned from a six-month residency at the Australia Council’s B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. He ...

Alex Skovron’s impressive volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator, drawn from all of his published work to date, shows him to be a writer of recurrent and abiding preoccupations. He cares passionately and sometimes rather fastidiously about culture (particularly European culture), and continually worries about words, books, and their import. H ...

Books of the Year 2014

Robert Adamson et al.
Monday, 01 December 2014

Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.

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Published in December 2014, no. 367

Paul Hetherington on the exhibition 'Australia'

Paul Hetherington
Thursday, 31 October 2013

Ninety years after ‘An Exhibition of Australian Art’ was held at Burlington House, London, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, the exhibition Australia opened on 21 September 2013. Touted as the biggest exhibition of Australian art to be staged in the United Kingdom, it is an ambitious undertaking – nothing less than a survey exhibition encapsulati ...

Published in November 2013, no. 356
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