Tag Archives: David Grant Lloyd

David Grant Lloyd, Still Alive in Dubbo (Flying Island Poets 2026)

It’s poetry month in Australia. The Red Room Poetry site has a calendar of a huge number of events – at this link. In my own modest way, partly by accident, I’m participating by blogging about a lot of poetry, four posts so far and four to go if I can get my act together.

Still Alive in Dubbo is Number 5.

This is a follow up to David Grant Lloyd’s first volume of poetry, Alive in Dubbo. Like that book, it is set entirely in the New South Wales country town of Dubbo. There are memories of early childhood and schooldays, youthful escapades involving sex, drugs and/or petty crime, character sketches and street scenes. What I said in my blog post about the first book (at this link) is true of this one:

A portrait of the town emerges that’s unlikely to attract tourists, but it rings true – as if the poet has set out regularly with a verbal equivalent of a sketch book and come back with its pages full.

Page 79* is one section of a multi-part poem, ‘Sketches II’. Each of the poem’s eleven sections describes a building or similar location. The descriptions are deadpan, as if the aim is simply to document. Page 79 is ‘Baby Health Care’.

This is definitely the art that conceals art. You might read the poem and think that it has done nothing but describe a building – it’s factual, concrete documentation. But if so why does it leave the reader with a powerful sense of melancholy?

Across the road from Centrelink 
there is still something 
built of redbrick

If you’re Australian and know what Centrelink is, just these first lines are enough to signal misery. Centrelink is the government agency responsible for paying pensions, unemployment benefits and so on. Its standing in the community has been trashed in recent decades because of what is known as the Robodebt scandal, in which a computerised system went after perceived overpayments, leading to major distress for many people to the extent that some took their own lives. ‘Across the road from Centrelink’ is a bit like ‘Down the street from Hell’. Or perhaps, given the positive connotations of the poem’s title, ‘Baby Health Care’, it may be ‘The antithesis of Hell’. The NSW government provides free care for families with children up to five years old – what used to be known ad Baby Health Centres were a much loved institution. But no, ‘there is still something’: the more benign presence has relegated to the past – all that is left is ‘something / made of red brick’. That is to say, a building, just a building.

[Actually I had a look in Apple Maps: the building opposite NSW Services (Centrelink) is a Community Centre. A sign on its front door advertises a toy library. ]

A low stone wall out front 
well-kept lawn
Sometimes the gate is open 
sometimes shut
Hollow skeletal frame
tiled steps lead through an alcove 
iron railing juts out 
like the creeping thorn beside
Venetian blinds shut over the panes 
petition office space
an unplugged telephone on the counter
Vacant light

As description this is terrific. The image that it conjures up matches what you can see online to an extraordinary degree. But the emotive words that slip in almost unobserved do their work. ‘Hollow skeletal frame’ reinforces the notion that the life has gone out of the building: what remains – something – is hollowed out, the skeletal remains. The greenery is creeping thorn, surely an oblique reference to the story of Sleeping Beauty. The blinds are shut, the phone unplugged, the light vacant.

Not all the places that get a guernsey in ‘Sketches II’ are as desolate as this. There’s an adventure park, and the council chambers have signs of life. But melancholy is the dominant mood in this poem and indeed in the book as a whole. The last line of ‘Gumtree Medical Centre’, the book’s last poem, is, ‘My prescription need another upgrade.’ If that means the poet might find a way to be more cheerful, I’m all for it. But not if it dulls his willingness to look at things as they actually are and record them mercilessly.

I intend to pass this book on to a family member who lived in Dubbo for many years, and has plenty of stories of his own to tell.

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I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Still Alive in Dubbo. I do subscribe, but I suspect I wasn’t charged this year. 

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I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read Still Alive in Dubbo on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island). I acknowledge their Elders past and present, including their sustained struggle to have the island’s long history acknowledged. I wrote this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, and likewise acknowledge their elders past and present. I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

This is my second post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

D G Lloyd was born in Dubbo in the late 70s. After spending some time in coastal cities as a young adult, he lives in Dubbo once again. This book is a celebration, of sorts, of his hometown.

It opens with an epigraph from one of Dubbo’s most notorious daughters, Kate Leigh, who is described politely by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as ‘a crime entrepreneur’. The epigraph reads, ominously, ‘Better dead than alive in Dubbo.’

Roughly speaking there are three kinds of poems in the book: incidents from childhood or more recent times, impressionistic images of places, and character sketches. There’s poverty and various kinds of desperation, churches and a brothel, heroin and alcohol, First Nations and settlers (I read D G Lloyd as non-Indigenous), locusts and PTSD. A portrait of the town emerges that’s unlikely to attract tourists, but it rings true – as if the poet has set out regularly with a verbal equivalent of a sketch book and come back with its pages full.

Page 76 chimes beautifully with the epigraph, being the book’s only poem dedicated to the dead:

Old Dubbo Cemetery
Uncared for, a grassy verge and 
artificial roses decorating headstones 
fallen in;
corroded shards and etchings, tilted obelisks,
a cobweb and an orb-weaver in between

the dirt and the gravel, 
oleanders,
a baby's grave marked by a small iron cross; 
the stone angel. Eyeless.
Sullen lips speckled with mould, petals 
drifting from outstretched fingers onto brown earth.

A council worker stands behind hakea wattle 
scraping his boot against the water meter. Cicadas 
chant (endless);
one of the monuments is missing an arm.
A blue-tongued lizard lies motionless beneath, 
bathing in sunlight
against a tawny, heart-shaped tombstone.

The conjures up an image of the cemetery, without editorialising or sentiment. Like most of the book, it feels artless: no rhyme to speak of, no metrical effects, no striking metaphors. Yet it holds the attention – I’ve now read it a dozen times and I’m not tired of it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. There’s no full verb in the first two stanzas, but a past participle on almost every line: Uncared for, fallen in, corroded, tilted, marked, speckled, outstretched. All movement is in the past. What life there is, in grass, orb-weaver, oleanders and mould, doesn’t disrupt the lifelessness. The first of the two present participles in these stanzas – decorating – is as static as the headstones it refers to. At last in the eleventh line, there’s some movement with a second present participle – drifting.

As if the spell has been broken, the third stanza is full of life and action: a council worker scrapes his boots, a wattle grows, cicadas chant, a blue-tongued lizard sunbathes. The water meter, by implication, ticks. That the cicadas’ chant is endless suggests that in some way life goes on and will keep going on. One of the statues now has a full verb – ‘is missing’ – so even there there’s a hint of agency.

The final image of the lizard, the sunlight and the tombstone is already full of life, when the description of the tombstone as tawny, heart-shaped takes it to another level. The unexpected ‘tawny’ describes the the tombstone as a rich brown, weathered colour rather than the dull grey that dominates most cemeteries, but the vital associations from its usual use – of wild animals and birds, or port wine – hover around it.

Finally, the stone is heart-shaped. It would be pushing it to see a reference to the famous last line of Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb‘, ‘What will survive of us is love,’ but that is presumably the hope that led to the tombstone being shaped that way. Here the love has not survived, but its emblem, the’ tawny heart-shaped tombstone’, is part of the life that continues.

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I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Alive in Dubbo.