There’s a Japanese tradition of writing death poems. These aren’t just poems about death but poems when the poet knows death is imminent. The tradition has its own Wikipedia page.
This is Clive James’s death anthology, compiled when he knew death wasn’t far off and published after he died. His wife and daughters helped in the writing, as he was effectively blind when he began and increasingly sick as the work progressed. His elder daughter Claerwen, he says on his acknowledgements was the book’s ideal editorial curator:
There were times when I could generate individual passages of a note, but its higher architecture was beyond me. She became adept at assembling coherent prose from a heap of bits and pieces.
So this is an idiosyncratic collection of poems, many of which James says he has by heart and can say aloud, or could before his powers began to fail him. It begins with ‘Western Wind’, just four likes written before Chaucer started ‘the fashion for poets having names’, and ends with ‘The Red Sea’ by Stephen Edgar, who was ‘soon to bear the burden of being known as Sydney Technical High School’s most prominent poetic alumnus’.
There’s an introductory note offering rules for reading poetry aloud. Each of the poems included is followed by a note, and the notes range from observations on technique and form to purely personal associations. It doesn’t claim to be a Best Poems. There are more war poems than you might expect, and a number of poems that few readers will have heard of. Christina Rossetti makes the cut but William Blake doesn’t. He comments scathingly on Robert Lowell and, apart from the postscript, ‘Growing up poetical in Australia’, he includes ony three Australians.
Page 79* is devotes to Edward Fitzgerald – six stanzas from his’The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”. I know that this is an excellent poem ‘to get by heart and say aloud’ because I once walked with an older friend who recited the whole thing to me as a way of calming down after a stressful encounter. One of the stanzas he includes happens to be the first one I came across. Actually I met it in a parody, a quote from Alfred E Newman on the title page of a Mad magazine. That version was, ‘A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou, and pretty soon I’m drunk, fat and in trouble.’ Fitzgerald’s actual stanza XII is:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
In his commentary, James doesn’t pay any attention to the problematic relationship of Fitzgerald’s poem to an original Persian poem. Instead, he reminds us that it was ‘a standard recital piece in every genteel English household’ which he first heard read by his mother. He throws in some witty insults to Robert Graves and ends with a line from satirist S. J. Perelman, ‘And thou, beside me, yacketing in the wilderness.’
It’s a farewell note, filled with gossip, memoir, and an occasional gag, from a deeply unfashionable poet, for whom poetry was a great, abiding love.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Jo Langdon’s short stories in literary journals over the years, and her name has cropped up on this blog more than once (at this link if you’re interested). When she wrote me a gracious email offering a copy of her new book of poetry, I was delighted. I was also apprehensive: her stories deal with dark subjects including schoolgirls’ cruelty, entitled misogyny, and the shadow of family violence.
As it turned out, I loved the book from the very first poem, ‘Tend’, which is one of a number of poems dealing with what the back-cover blurb calls the postpartum experience. I don’t want to say more about it here – an earlier draft of this blog post went on at great length without saying much besides that it’s a terrific poem. If you want to read it, you can find it at this link, on the website of Island, where it was first published. (Trigger warning: it’s a postpartum poem that mentions the perineum and stitches.)
The thing is, the poems about childbearing, powerful though they are, feel like a sideshow to the book’s main event. The third poem in the book, ‘Disambiguate’, declares:
She never wanted to write birth poems.
The poems she did want to write, evidently, are those that make up more than half of the book, devoted to the life and work of Alina Szapocznikov (1926–1973), Polish sculptor and Holocaust survivor. I hadn’t heard of Szapocznikov. It’s a sign of the poetry’s effectiveness that I have now spent far too much time looking at her work online. It’s an engrossing process: read the poem, look at the sculpture it names, read the poem again with different eyes.
For example, these lines from ‘Indexicality’, which may have inspired the book’s cover, describe a sculpture:
The Bachelor's Ashtray – cast from the artist's own
mouth, chin and neck (each doubled) – into which are embedded real cigarette butts
When you see the actual work (at this link or this one), the horror of the lines comes into clearer focus, and Langdon’s gloss – ‘cast from the artist’s own’ – adds an extra frisson.
A long poem, ‘Body of Work, or Outline’, which gives a brief version of Szapocznikov’s life story, includes a brilliant analogy for the poet’s fascination with her:
body burdensome, a load. Perhaps the writer is (I am, in this) the nuisance ghost, reaching, imposing textual expression – language in which Szapocznikov lives
(but) for too short a time –
The book’s third section, ‘Thesamealina’ (the quote marks are part of the title), is one long poetic sequence. Having learned that with contemporary poetry the author’s notes can provide invaluable help to the reader, I checked the endnotes. ‘Thesamealina’, I learned, is found poetry comprising textual fragments taken from Szapocznikov’s letters to Ryszard Stanisławski. The latter, I learned elsewhere, was her first husband, an art historian and museum director. The poems aren’t concerned with the particulars of time and place, or relationship. Some are from letters written in hospital, others seem to come from the midst of a working artist’s life; some imply marital intimacy, others feel more like words an artist might address to a friendly gallery owner. That Stanisławski was Szapocznikov’s husband I learned from Wikipedia rather than from the poems themselves.
My first impulse with this sequence was to try to extract a story: where is Szapocznikov writing from, why is she apart from her husband, what does she mean when she refers to his ‘ladies’ and her men, what insights can be gleaned into her art, her political and cultural milieux? The poem has a documentary dimension, so it makes sense to ask these questions, to want to know more about its subject. And there is an overarching story. But at the same time, it is poetry, so it’s important to attend to the words on the page, to not give over completely to the extractive impulse. Interestingly, only when I set about describing the poem here did I actually go to Wikipedia.
So, here’s page 79*, part of ‘Thesamealina’:
Perhaps these are just passages copied directly from letters with added line breaks, and the poetry is mainly in the selection. Perhaps text has been omitted, reassembled, or otherwise tailored. As readers, we don’t know, and don’t need to know. It’s enough that this is Szapocznikov’s voice, filtered to us by Langdon. We are reading Langdon’s reading of Szapocznikov. The underlining draws our attention to the text’s origins in a handwritten letter, clearly a letter home from somewhere that is not Poland. (My Wikipedia research doesn’t offer any suggestions of a place that has palm trees and cactus.)
Palm trees grow here as pines would
at home, cactuses up
like great big trees.
Sky is sky-blue, sea
turquoise. Daisies, even
an apple tree in bloom.
The cemetery lovely, lush, verdant,
the little French angel with
the broad forehead, fine features full
of sweetness, the same fierce expression
vexed by fog and cold.
Just as you think it’s a matter-of-fact traveller’s letter, that sweet little angel in the ‘lovely, lush, verdant’ cemetery brings a note of fierce vexation. And the sound of the words emphasise the change – after all the flowing language, the three one-syllable words in the last line bring one up short.
'They don't even have ink in this dump' —Alina Szapocznikow to Ryszard Stanisławski
The sequence is punctuated by ten one-liners like this. All but one of them are attributed: ‘Alina Szapocznikow to Ryszard Stanisławski’; the other is from him to her. They don’t have direct bearing on the poems that follow, except perhaps to ground them in actual letters, in this case to clarify that the letters are written from some kind of exile, perhaps in the Jura mountains.
There are no cliffs here at all like you imagine they're magnificent hills covered in grass_________________ cows
walk in a dignified, milky, serious manner, nipping
at the fragrant meadows, the bells on their necks slowly ringing_______ pure tone
It's only when you get up into the clouds that there are really cliffs, but they're far.
It’s another letter home. I’m a sucker for cows in poetry. I love that space before and after cows – it conjures up a landscape dotted with cows, and then moving in to closeup so we see their ‘dignified, milky, serious / manner’. I don’t care who came up with that string of adjectives: if it was Szapocznikow, I’m glad Langdon put this frame on it. Then, like the top part of the page, there’s an unsettling note in the last lines. The poem moves from ‘There are no cliffs’ to ‘there / are really cliffs’. The resonances and possible impicatiuons are legion.
Again, we are reading Langdon’s reading of Szapocznikov, an interesting, complex, tantalising business.
If you’re reading this and have read the book, or even part of it, I’d love to hear your take on it.
My copy of Delivery is a gift from the author.
I am a man of settler heritage living on Gadigal Wangal country, where spiders are everywhere and teh bogong moths have mostly come and gone. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
This book won the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. I imagine the judging panel having a great time sitting around the table reading aloud to each other.
The book’s nineteen poems flow like a river in spate, swerving from subject to subject, but keeping control. Most of them are in short lines with no punctuation apart from an occasional question mark, slash or exclamation mark, as if the poet is too busy to pay attention to such fiddly stuff, but lets the line breaks and rhythm do the punctuation work. I found myself reading fast, as if riding a wave.
The first poem comes with ungainly title, ‘Here Is The Shirt, (Get) Off My Back / Swimming In The Afternoon’. Possibly because I currently spend a fair amount of time with young grandchildren, I was in thrall from its opening lines:
if you want an alarm clock to work make sure you place it out of reach but never mind our mutual friends are awake and so are we 549am i am dad im on demand raaah-biiiish truuuuuuck! i run out to see the bin flung up and over with you
Life is rich and full, and who needs alarm clocks?
In this poem and the rest of the book the poet’s two young daughters emerge as fully loveable characters. I wonder how they’d get on with the two young girls who are similarly alive and interesting in Toby Fitch’s ‘Morning Walks in a Time of Plague’ (blogged about by me at this link).
As well as the arduous joys of parenthood, poems deal with work in a bookshop – ‘Erotics of Bookselling’ puts that work front and centre, but it’s often there incidentally. The poet travels with his family to his native Türkiye, celebrates his Melbourne neighbours, makes his political affiliations clear, grapples with the migrant experience, all with tremendous vitality and wit. A couple of lines in ‘Hot Water’ (on page 48) might stand in as a general description:
and the poem is a psychic luna park of associations that just come when the soil is ready
Page 79* is the fourth of seven pages of the poem ‘Monolingualism Swamp’. That title may sound ominous, but there’s nothing ponderous or strident about the poem itself. The poet and his family are in Türkiye, he enjoys the way languages flow in Istanbul’s spice market (‘turkish arabic english russian’), and wonders:
i was gifted two languages whattabout me kids? they say growing up bilingual is good for your brain
When one of his daughters asks if he reads Turkish books, he feels ‘her monolingual pain’. Later in the poem he buys seven books to take home. The poem ends:
ill read these books in turkish my daughters will see me ___thumbing the dictionary
That’s the skeleton of the narrative, but it leaves out the ‘psychic luna park of associations’. Page 79 is almost entirely taken up with a digression. A story from possibly ten years earlier, before the children were born, it pretty much stands by itself as a narrative poem:
Here’s the text, including a couple of scene-setting lines from the previous page, and omitting the last three line of the page, which move back into the poem’s present:
in 2016 I had a little desk here
in an artisans building on the third floor
next door a fitter and turner
trembling walls
he brings me tea
you wanna come to friday prayers?
looking at my world map on the wall he says
turkeys in the centre of the world bro
right in the centre not like austria thats off-centre
australia!
even worse wheres that? in the ass-end!
one day we left work at the same time
walked side by side
he had just bought a pair of timberland boots
and was feeling pumped
his last pair lasted seven years
and were easily worth the two weeks wages
do you make money writing?
not really
why do you write?
its a habit
do you write in turkish?
mostly english
do people read books in austria?
not much
in turkey no one reads
they like pornos you should write pornos then youll make money
you have a point...
Every time I read it I smile.
I love this cameo appearance of an actual Turkish man in the middle of the poem’s ruminations about language. It’s a portrait created almost entirely out of speech, either direct or reported. For him, being bilingual isn’t a big deal – he speaks English with a North American accent (‘bro’, ‘wanna’), and his world view is cheerfully and unapologetically Turkey-centric. Islamic observance is integrated into daily life, and is a way of checking out a foreigner.
It’s a good example of the way Başkan’s lines flow. You may have to think for a brief moment at the tenth line – ‘australia’ – to check who’s speaking. But that pause for thought creates a natural break in the rhythm before the fitter and turner’s response, and you can feel the poet’s pleasure in recording that response.
I am grateful to the Giramondo Publishing Company for my copy of Two Hundred Million Musketeers. The publicity material accompanying it included an author’s note, in which Başkan says he returned to writing when his first child was learning to talk: ‘Mumbo jumbo and jibber jabber filled our home.’ The poetry in this book brings the exuberance of jibber jabber to the preoccupations of an adult life, from the difficulty of ordering takeaway coffee from people who can’t pronounce your name to the many crises of late capitalism. I’m so glad the judges of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards prompted me to take it from the shelf.
I am a man of settler heritage living on Gadigal Wangal country, where the days are suddenly warmer and magpies seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
I’ve been ruminating on Guess the Experience for about a month now. More precisely, I’ve been trying to find words for what I enjoy about it – and I have enjoyed it a lot.
It’s not the kind of poetry you can memorise to recite at weddings, funerals, sleepless nights, break-ups, or fallings-in-love.*
It doesn’t have a compelling narrative or a straightforward argument.
Rather than try for generalities, I’ll stick to page 79**, and see what I come up with.
Page 79 is part of an eight-page poem, ‘pulp to reform’. An endnote informs/reminds us that Pulp was a British art-rock band. In 2022, commenting on a facebook headline, ‘Pulp to Reform’, Melbourne poet Michael Farrell said it sounded like the title of a Pam Brown poem. She rose to the challenge and wrote the poem. As far as I can tell, the poem doesn’t relate to the band at all (though I did go looking: ‘Common People‘ was their song).
The poem is made up of six sections ranging from 11 to 27 lines long. It’s not always clear how the sections relate to each other. In fact it came as a surprise to me on first reading when the last lines referred back to the opening. The first section begins:
this is __my first interview ____since my death
And the poem ends:
from this cardboard coffin ________some final words –
So the poem’s set-up is clear: the speaker is giving a posthumous interview. But it doesn’t deliver on that promise. The final section acknowledges as much, and also contains a description of the poetry. Here it is in full:
this interview has digressed
i'm not sure what you want ____to know
is it about the poetry?
all ___accidental
from this cardboard coffin ________some final words –
Pretty much everything between the opening lines and ‘this interview / has digressed’ is digression. But if you want to know about the poetry, the speaker says, I can tell you it is ‘all accidental’. The speaker obviously isn’t Pam Brown herself – Pam Brown isn’t dead, for one thing. But ‘all / accidental’ isn’t a bad description of how this poetry feels. Having said that, there’s always a sense of discipline in the lines.
But I’ve got ahead of myself.
Page 79 is roughly the first half of the poem’s third section. In my reading the first section has set up the situation and given an elliptical account of the speaker’s death (‘I swallowed / a cotton bud’ – comedy rather than tragedy) – and of the kinds of health fads she had lived among. The second, she recalls working in the kitchen. Georges Perec is mentioned and apparently quoted – ‘question your teaspoons’. The reference was obscure to me, and in my usual lazy manner I was happy to accept it as adding flavour. But because I’m blogging about the poem I went hunting and found this wonderfully illuminating quote from Perec’s 1973 essay, ‘Approaches to What?’ (at this link):
It turns out the reference isn’t just adding flavour. The speaker has been noticing details in the kitchen sink (‘little transparent / purplish white globes’), Perec’s essay comes to mind and, crucially, Perec’s injunction, ‘Describe your street,’ prompts the transition to the next section, the one on page 79 (ignore the first two words):
out in the street on the odd numbers side ________a house number ________-_____is missing
heading north to south _-__facing east
into sunrises pinkish or reddish on a good morning
this is 147 the hermit's at 149 __-__151 is missing no house_ no number then the rental terrace 153
On first reading I enjoyed this page for a completely idiosyncratic reason. My six-year-old grandson is currently fascinated by numbers, and his fascination is contagious. He loves it, for example, that we are in unit 43, across the landing is 41, the unit directly under us is 40. And now I love it too. These lines feed directly into that fascination. Having done my research and come to a reading that makes sense of what the lines are doing in the context of the poem as a whole, the initial pleasure stays in place, but feels less idiosyncratic: the poem is drawing attention to such trivial details as ways by which, as Georges Perec puts it, we try ‘to lay hold on our truth’.
This section of the poem continues – it takes up the ‘sunrises / pinkish or reddish’, with a description of an inner-city dawn. In the following sections, the speaker remembers, as it were, that she is speaking after having died, and recollects that when alive she was ‘always polite / & / friendly’, speaking a little Greek at the deli and regretting that she never took up an offer to go to Samos. It all feels arbitrary, until it reaches the final lines I quoted above, ending with an inclusive dash.
The word that comes to mind is immersion. The poem creates the illusion that you (that is, the reader) are privy to the poet’s mind – not to her finished, carefully utterances, but the turmoil of actual, distractible thinking in an actual inner-suburban place, ‘all / accidental’ but enjoyable as evidence that the human mind is, after all, the most complex entity in the known universe.
My copy of the book was a generous gift from the author.
I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post as the days are beginning to lengthen and get colder on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.
* I just remembered a funeral where Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman‘ was played as the mourning congregation watched a slideshow of the deceased’s life, so anything is possible. **My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
This is the third book by Magadalena Ball I’ve read. The others were Density of Compact Bone (2021) and Bobish (2023). Links are to my blog posts. I enjoyed those very different books a lot, so when High Wire Step arrived as one of the past publications included in my 2026 subscription from Flying Island, I was happy.
I still am happy. But I find myself unable to make any easy generalisation about the book. Each of its 40 poems stands alone and expects a reader to take time to savour it.
For instance, ‘Giantess’ is a monologue by the character who let Jack into her husband’s kitchen when he arrived from the beanstalk – beginning ‘I took a chance / opening the door’. There are a number of elegiac poems, and some enigmatic poems that seem to be childhood memories. There’s a longer poem, ‘Art of the Deal’, which begins:
While I grew up in lower Manhattan's housing project the pre-dawn cusp of gentrification there was a shadow rising
and goes on to be a poem in which Donal Trump walks as he probably couldn’t in these Trump-saturated days. There’s a poem about the designer card game mille bornes, which begins ‘This is not a game.’
You get an idea of the diversity.
‘Trickle-down’, on page 78–79*, is a nice sample. It springs from a brief encounter – or even non-encounter – of a kind that happens often in city life. The poem’s main speaker passes a young woman begging in the street:
Trickle-down
The title suggests that the poem relates to the term ‘trickle-down economics’, government policy that favours the wealthy with the professed belief that the benefits will trickle down to those less wealthy.
What follows is not exactly a dialogue, but the poem has two characters. The first is evoked in the short opening line:
Alone in the cold night tin pot empty
The second, the poem’s main speaker, takes four lines to be introduced:
walking the streets, not as flâneur, taking notes going home to a warm meal, anger a forgotten luxury like a hot bath, starvation a choice you once made skipping lunch as an act of defiance.
It’s not a glib contrast between someone begging and someone well-off and smug, or even someone idly observing ‘as flâneur, taking notes’. She’s on her way home from work, and there are elliptical bits of backstory, perhaps flashes of memory prompted by the sight of the begging woman. Once she was angry and defiant, but never experienced deprivation except by choice. The paradox of anger as a luxury suggests a life with dulled emotions, where the person is ground down by life’s demands
It’s interesting that the phrase ‘a choice you once made’ is the first time a personal pronoun appears. Until then the two characters have been implied in the naming of objects (the tin pot, the warm meal, the hot bath), emotions (anger) or actions (walking, defiance, skipping lunch). The poem takes its time to focus on the people.
Once there was anger, choice, defiance. The implication is that these are no longer there. There must have been a point where that changed. Acknowledging this, the poem completes the introduction of the passerby:
Past the tipping point, your body becomes commodity for vested interests you can't find the way back
She is caught up in the urban rat race. I like the fine touch of ‘your body becomes / commodity’. It’s not even an individualised commodity, just part of a general substance.
In the next stanza, there is a different you, who sees the world from where she sits at the edge of the footpath:
safety is an echo chamber that crowds in as you beg a cigarette, a dollar or to simply be invisible there amidst the shoppers in their fancy shoes and contempt, heading somewhere always in a hurry.
Now there’s an I for the first time. The passerby snaps out of her numb state and becomes the speaker of the poem. She wasn’t taking notes, but now she forces herself to look, to notice details about the other woman, to reflect briefly on the way the economic system creates such poverty, to imagine something of the other woman’s life at least in general terms. This mental act of compassionate witness is as important as giving money:
I force myself to look though it hurts stuffing notes into your shaking hands your pretty face tired with lack of sleep the endless hustle just a nameless trickle-down casualty though somewhere there's a mother in the cool dark wishing you were there with her taking the blame for your absence wondering how much further there is to fall and where the bottom is.
The final stanza brings together words and images from earlier. She is warm, angry (is it still a luxury?), would march (as oppose to shopping in fancy shoes or being always in a hurry), guilty (like the begging woman’s mother). She forms fists, whereas the other woman hands were shaking. And the opening words of the stanza echoes ‘safety‘ from earlier:
I can't save you though I'd march across any road picket in hand to get you somewhere better, and here, in the warmth where I open and close my fists angry at my impotence and guilt am aware that I can't save anyone not even myself in this beautiful, ravaged world.
The last line is a final harking back: the begging woman’s pretty, sleep-deprived face becomes in retrospect a metaphor (or do I mean a synecdoche) for the state of the world.
I think it would be a mistake to read this as a manifesto of despair. I think it’s more a waking from numbness: by allowing (forcing?) herself to feel for this individual, the speaker has opened the possibility of acknowledging what she sees happening in the big picture. Certainly, that last line feels like a door swinging open to a vast panorama: anger is no longer a forgotten luxury.
You can find out more about the marvellous Magdalena Ball at her website, at this link.
And that’s my last post for Poetry Month 2026. I managed to post about nine books (not all of them read this month), and go to two live events – the Red Room’s National Poetry Month Gala and the penultimate Annual Francis Webb Reading. Poetry lives!
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read High Wire Step on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island), and have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal country, which is just as beautiful but not as warm. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, and I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
This book is part of the Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia project, based at the University of Sydney. According to the project’s website:
Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia brings together historical materials from national and international collections in languages other than English. We seek to rethink and enlarge narratives about Australia that come solely from English-language sources, by showing modern Australia to be a complex multilingual creation.
According to its introduction, the book offers a small selection from the substantial body of verse in Chinese produced in Australia in the first third of the 20th century. There are 41 poems and a prose record of an excursion to Taronga zoo, all given in the original Chinese with an English translation and brief notes on the poems and, where possible, on the authors.
Mostly they are occasional poems – written to mark the arrival or departure of a friend or colleague, or to record an event of some sort. They also reflect on the political situation in China, and the experience of being Chinese in Australia. They come from sources such as Sydney’s Chinese Republic News and Tung Wah Times. Collectively, they give a sense of an active transient community of literate Chinese in this country.
An editorial decision was made by the translators not to attempt to reproduce the poetic forms of the poems. For a reader who can’t read Chinese then, the book bears witness to the existence of these poems while offering only shadow of the actual poetry. Here’s a taste:
There is nothing in the poem to indicate that it was written in Australia, but an endnote informs us that it was published in the Chinese Republic News on 9 August 1919. Unlike most of the poems in the book, it was anonymous, and there is no note from the author. The editors’ note, which refers to it and the poem on the next spread, gives us a glimpse of a community living in Australia but alive to a Chinese national point of view.
The Chinese, on the right, clearly conforms to a strict poetic form. There are four lines, each consisting of two parts made up of eight characters. With that in mind, I go back to what at first seems to be straightforward English prose on the left, and see that it actually consists of four couplets.
This makes me itch to do a version that reads more like poetry. Here’s a go:
We dreamed of peace and wake to sorrow. Talks have failed, packed up and gone. POTUS sang a sweet love song. Disaster from the east tomorrow.
Bridge builder, Robin Hood, pocket-liner, power-grabber, split our melon, feed the robber. Our plains blaze. We must gather wood.
I’m not saying that the editors / translators should have done anything differently, let alone anything as rinky-dink as that. It’s just that while I appreciated the historical, sociological interest of the book, I wished I could have a greater sense of the poetry.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I live and blog on Gadigal and Wangal land, and gratefully acknowledge their Elders past and present, I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
Kontra, the third book of poetry by Eunice Andrada, has won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry and is shortlisted for other awards, including the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Andrada’s previous books, Flood Damages and TAKE CARE (links are to my blog posts) deal a lot with female suffering, especially in the context of colonisation, with what Andrada calls ‘bare vulnerability’. Kontra‘s poems focus mainly on the figure of the kontrabida, the villainess in Filipino soap operas that viewers love to hate. It comes at the same subject from a different angle, and it’s a book in which the women fight back.
Whereas the soap opera (or teleseryes) heroine, the bida, tends to be virtuously well behaved, the kotrabida is ferocious and glamorous, though doomed to loss and humiliation, or worse. Andrada sets out to give her a fuller life. She says in an author’s note:
The kontrabida always arrives fully formed, without a backstory. I couldn’t find out what she thought by going off the information that was presented through teleserye storylines. Through poems that oscillate between her and me, I wanted to piece together her lineage, and in doing so, look at my own. I was thinking about my blood lineage and my poetic lineage, the women who have hurt me and healed me, and the poets who shaped me.
I have never seen a Filipino soap opera – the closest I’ve come is an event billed as a Bading Talent Show at the Marrickville Bowling Club, in which a number of men in spectacular drag gave off the kind of energy I now recognise as belonging to the kontrabida.
If I were to stick to my usual practice of looking at page 79*, I would now discuss ‘Speaking of Love’, which has the explanatory subtitle, ‘cento for women slain in operas – may you live in love forever’. A cento, as you may know, is a poem made up of lines taken from other poems. This poem does a beautiful job of repurposing lines to give the slain women an alternative, active fate.
But I’m breaking my rule to talk a little about the book’s second section.
There are three sections: ‘Kontra’, ‘Operá’ and ‘Bida’. ‘Kontra’ and ‘Bida’ feature the teleseryes characters. ‘Operá’ mostly leaves the world of teleseryes behind. It consists of a 25-page multi-part poem, described in an author’s note as a dyptich.
On the right-hand side of each spread, the poet responds to a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, with the introductory heading ‘[Florence, 2023]’. In case the painting is as unknown to you as the teleseryes are to me, you can see it at this link. It refers to the story in the Book of Judith, which is not considered part of the biblical canon by Jews or Protestants, but counts for the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
On the left, with the introductory heading ‘[Korte Suprema, 2025]’, poems riff on the subject of divorce in the Filipino context, and include personal accounts of family violence. The title ‘operá’ is defined on the section title page as a verb, ‘to perform a surgical operation’: some of the left-hand pages includes short instructional sections labelled ‘operá’ – thought experiments, perhaps, or magic procedures, or metaphorical surgeries.
The diptych sequence folds personal history, Philippine law, and mainstream western art into a single whole. For me, the Gentileschi painting acts as a bridge enabling me to connect with the world of the teleseryes, and to the book’s complex humanity, rather than leaving me on the outside looking in.
Hee’s a sample spread:
You see how it works. There are four components on the page. Let me walk you through them:
First on the left,
D. EITHER SPOUSE IS OF UNSOUND MIND
The sequence features five of these headings, numbered A to E. They give the conditions under which a woman may remarry while divorce remains illegal under Philippine law: A, Death of a spouse; B, Presumptive death; C, Alternative reality (I’m pretty sure that the law’s term for this is annulment); D, as on this page, Either spouse is on unsound mind; and E, introducing the final part of the sequence, Leaving the country.
Presented baldly in capitals, these headings create a restricting framework. Each of them is followed immediately by a spelling-out of its implications, sometimes as on this page offering a subclause, sometimes in extended narrative verse. The brevity of the response on this page builds on the narrative of family suffering that has followed ‘Presumptive death’.
d.1. Make an example of me. Make an example of me for eleven years.
It’s not clear who is speaking here. Because of the context, I first read it as the daughter of an abusive marriage where a woman is trapped. It could equally be the woman trapped in the marriage. Someone speaks back with passion to the impersonal legal language.
Then:
[Operá: Begin an argument between an older woman and a younger woman about the psychological effects of oral contraceptive pills. Record the conversation, then play the recording on a car ride to another state.]
In the sequence in general, the bracketed instructions imply that there is always something one can do. This is the only one that involves another person, It evokes the massive generational shift from Catholic-dominated Filipino culture to a more liberal secular mindset. Oral contraceptives aren’t recent news, and nor are car rides, but here they both represent modernity.
All of that is very Philippines specific. On the right-hand side, the speaker continues her contemplation of the 17th century Italian painting. In other parts of the sequence she has contemplated the painting, identifying with Artemisia Gentileschi as a rape survivor who went on to be a creative artist. Realising that Gentileschi returned to the Biblical story a number of times, she has sought out other versions. On this spread, the right-hand side of the diptych sequence takes a metapoetic turn:
I write the same poem, around it, through it, underneath it, until I can walk away from its every iteration. I cleave the head of the poem and other poems sprout in its place. This is how we make sense of our lives when there is no justice. The taking repeats. I enact the lyric moment.
Like Gentileschi, the speaker of the poem returns again and again to the same subject. Holofernes – now a symbolic figure – must be beheaded many times before ‘I’ can walk away from him. Cleaving its head is a brutal metaphor for resolving a poem’s issue – and I guess the process of writing poetry may at times feel brutal. But the subject stays alive through many iterations – or, in the imagery of this poem, sprouts new heads.
Gentileschi was raped as a young woman, and although her rapist was found guilty he was never punished. The poem suggests that her repeated depiction of the violence against Holofernes was a way of making sense of her life in the absence of justice. And not just her, but ‘we’. The I of the poem returns to the mistreatment of women and children – in the left-hand pages of this dyptich but not only there. There’s a fine reaching out in solidarity over the centuries and across cultural difference.
‘I enact the lyric moment.’ I don’t know if writing lyric poetry has ever before been compared to a bloody beheading.
There’s a lot more to this poem and to the book. I’m glad it’s being noticed by the awards judges.
I am grateful to the Giramondo Publishing Company for my copy.
I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
Gillian Rubinstein, Screaming and Euphoria (Flying Island 2026)
In the late 1980s I was visiting a friend in Adelaide when her son, who was 10 or 11 years old and a non-reader, waxed lyrical about a book called Space Demons. Though I was the editor of a children’s literary magazine I hadn’t heard of it. It was the first children’s book I read that involved computer games, and I soon shared my young friend’s enthusiasm.
Space Demons (1987) was Gillian Rubinstein’s first book. She went on to write more than 30 books for children, including picture books. On the one occasion I heard her read from her work, she read Dog in, Cat Out (1993), which even without Ann James’s brilliant illustrations was a hilarious riff on the demands of pets. From the early 2000s, she wrote for adults in a long-running series of historical novels set in Japan, under the pseudonym Lian Hearn.
Screaming and Euphoria is her first book of poetry.
It’s a book of memory, with a masterful story-telling skill suffusing its many short poems. There is a complicated childhood, as the title of ‘Villanelle for my three fathers’ suggests. Poems celebrate a childhood friend, her sister, a long living pet dog, a visit as a teenager to Kano in Nigeria (‘my white skin bubbled with sunburn’). She tells of her marriages (the poem ‘Marriage to Ion’ begins ‘I did not love my first husband’ and ends, ‘he ran off with a Swingle singer, / leaving me dizzy with relief / and gratitude.’) She has children, and the evokes experience of early parenthood, especially in ‘A riddle’ (page 55), which begins:
I am the expected intruder sleep disruptor, life exploder treasure of the poor. I will shatter your illusions. I will fill you with love.
It’s not a continuous narrative, but there’s a roughly chronological ordering of memories (as in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, intense remembered moments).
The poems that stand out for me are those dealing with loss and grief. There are a number of losses, as you would expect from a poet who is in her 80s – parents (‘Daddy: full fathom five’ recalls the death of her father when she was 10 years old), friends, and towards the end her husband Philip. I love ‘What they talked about before he died’, a wonderful, restrained elegy: and ‘Boiling Eggs’, in which she recalls his inept but loving daily breakfast-making. The poem on page 78*, ‘An Aubade for Philip’, is one of my favourites:
It’s one of the few rhyming poems in the book, and one of the few that announces itself as belonging to a particular tradition. There’s a kind of humility in this. It places the poem in a tradition of poems dealing with similar material, and suggests that the experience it refers to, however intense or painful, is in an important sense not unique. It’s part of our shared humanity.
An aubade is a traditional form, the dawn equivalent of a serenade. Originally it would consist of a lover bidding farewell to the beloved as the sun rose. John Donne wrote a number that played with the form but kept this basic premise:
Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Of course the form has morphed over the centuries. Probably the most famous example of the 20th century, Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, doesn’t feature a lover at all, but in the hours before dawn its speaker experiences a deep fear of death (you can read it at this link). Gillian Rubinstein may have had this poem at the back of her mind, especially the second line:
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
Both she and he wake at four, and neither is in the presence of a lover. Both are in rhyming iambics. But there the similarities end:
Four in the morning. The alarm is ringing, I let the cat in, make green tea and write. Still dark but the first birds are singing, singing and singing with the growing light.
These stolen hours are mine.
This is a moment of solitude. There’s comfort in the presence of the cat, joy in the singing of the birds, pleasure in the cup of tea, and purpose in the writing. The hours before dawn are to be relished.
Then the beloved comes to mind, and we realise that this pre-dawn time is a respite:
These stolen hours are mine. I can forget the cruel way your illness has progressed, the latest treatment and the latest test, the timetable round which my life is set.
It’s a love poem after all, not with mediaeval courtly love or the lusty ardour of John Donne but with the arduous commitment of an in-sickness-and-in-health kind of love.
Then the beloved himself appears, and the kookaburras announce that dawn has also come:
I hear your footsteps shuffle down the hall. My time is up. I put away my pen. Hello, you whisper. We begin again. The kookaburras sound their final call
Until now the poem’s speaker has been I. Now she is part of a we. The day begins again, and so does the we. ‘My time is up. / We begin again.’ There’s resignation there, not a lot of joy, but acceptance.
The first three stanzas are all in the present tense. That doesn’t change in the last two, but they are in a different present. If you were reading this poem to an audience, you would have to pause significantly between the third and fourth stanzas – the end of the third stanza, ‘the kookaburras sound their final call’, may make such a pause inevitable. The major event of the poem happens in that pause. The next phrase, ‘After your death’, makes sure we know that. But the poem continues in its measured way: in fully rhyming, perfectly scanned iambic pentameters:
After your death I often dream I hear those footsteps and that whisper at the door, wake in a mixture of delight and fear but there is only birdsong nothing more.
You can just feel the self-control here, the stiff upper lip. The screaming and euphoria of the book’s title are deeply submerged, indicated by the comparatively plain ‘delight and fear’. In the first stanza you feel the speaker’s elation as she writes to the accompaniment of the birds’ ‘singing, / singing and singing’. Now it’s, desolately, ‘only birdsong nothing more’.
But life goes on:
Two years later I pack up my sorrow
with all the memories of love and pity.
Dawn birds still sing even in the city,
sing and sing as if there’s no tomorrow.
Those quiet words, sorrow, love and pity, carry enormous weight.
Perhaps because I read this poem after two weeks away from the city, when I was woken up each morning by raucous birdsong of a kind that we just don’t have in Sydney’s Inner West, I felt the sorrowful optimism of those last two lines. Sure, we have rowdy lorikeets and white cockatoos, even an occasional kookaburra, but it’s not the same. It’s hard not to feel a deep ambicvalence in the poem’s final words: ‘there’s no tomorrow.’
I hope this book finds its way to the many readers of her children’s books and historical novels.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read Screaming and Euphoria on the plane from Wulgurukaba land, beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island) to Gadigal and Wangal land where I live and write this blog. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. Because the excellent poem that begins on page 79 of this book continues for several pages, I have broken my rule and picked the single-page poem on p78.
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.
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.
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.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.
I enjoyed Brian Purcell’s 2025 poetry collection, Filmworks (my blogpost here). It turns out that Brian is not only one of the poets in the Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series, he also does some of the work of fulfilling subscription orders for the series. For $120 a year, subscribers receive a bundle, usually of ten books. When Brian was packaging up my bundle in January, he kindly added a copy of this book, his first, with a friendly inscription, and a limited-edition T-shirt sporting the cover of Filmworks, which I wear with pleasure.
The gesture is very much in the spirit of the Flying Island Poetry Community, which is all about relationships with a touch of the gift economy.
It’s a reminder that to read a book, perhaps especially a book of poetry, is basically to enter into a relationship with its author. The reader might sit at the writer’s feet to learn; might seethe at being hectored; might weep for the writer’s suffering or share in their joy; might laugh at their jokes, be in awe of their skill … the possibilities are endless.
Many of the poems in The Leaving have a strong sense of place, whether they are coastal New South Wales or places that the poet visits further afield. He makes an excellent travelling companion. I was completely on board when I read these lines in the first poem in the book, ‘Westerly at Bongil Beach’, loving the way they draw back the curtain on the process of composition. He tries to grasp the clouds, and manages to clasp a haiku, then shows us the haiku:
I reach up to grasp the torn dishcloth of clouds _____-------______ nature's dictionary opens ______-------_____ I clasp a haiku
______-------_____ the sand-laced wind ______-------_____ keeps shifting scrawling ________-------___ you will never win
No shame in that defeat.
Another poem where I felt strong fellow-feeling is ‘Angels Descending’, which recalls an encounter with a nun in a Catholic childhood:
Is this the way you receive the Host? Stick it out further! She grabbed his tongue. He would never forgive that indignity or the way the stiff white collar pressed red marks into her cool white skin.
Such an indignity was never visited on me, but I will never forget the rage-flushed face of Sister Mary Bride who taught me when I was five. The boy in this poem is eight, but his focus on the detail of the nun’s skin rings absolutely true for me.
The Christian reference in the title of the poem on page 78*, ‘Good Friday at Kungala’, seems at first glance much less significant. The poem captures a moment on a public holiday in a small New South Wales country town:
In the first two and last two stanzas, the poem’s speaker walks his dogs. In the middle two stanzas something else happens.
Good Friday at Kungala
Vivid new growth by the railway track dogs turn around to see I keep up
thankful for solitude rain never stops full moon obscured frogs croak at night
A man enjoys being alone, in connection with his dogs. There’s not much about Kungala on the internet but every general article mentions that the North Coast railway runs through it. There is no railway station there, and the first lines of the poem create a sense that it’s not a particularly busy line. It’s unpleasant weather, but not an unpleasant time and place to be.
So the next two stanzas are unexpected:
for sale everything not nailed down one man howling in ragged undergrowth
days to die alone no one within earshot unless a partner draws the curtains back
The first stanzas evoke a place that’s off the beaten track. In these stanzas the speaker’s attention turns to the social meanings of that. Everything is for sale – the place is dying. The speaker is ‘thankful for solitude’, but his mind goes to what that isolation can mean: a man takes days to die, howling. The reference to the partner who didn’t draw the curtains back hints at further darkness to the story.
The abruptness of this shift is a reminder that poetry needs to be read slowly, creatively. The poem doesn’t tell us what to feel, but leaves space around the words for us to form our own responses. If the poem is a film script, the reader is invited to be director, actors and cinematographer.
rags of ochre cloth hang from the trees the dog drops its stick at my feet
stooping in the cold my arm's stiff and weak the dog outruns my most forceful throw
Back to the dogs and details of the environment (‘the rags of ochre cloth’ sound like something that just happened to be there on the day, though if you read the Good Friday reference as central, they might suggest the torn curtain in the temple on that day). The speaker is suddenly aware of his own comparative frailty and discomfort (cold, stiff and weak in eight words). But the vitality of the dogs keeps him pushing against his limits.
Maybe the Good Friday reference does carry some weight after all. A man has died in agony, and another man spends a moment reflecting on that. It’s a long way from church, but the Stations of the Cross are not completely forgotten.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I read The Leaving 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 also acknowledge the Elders of Gadigal and Wangal. on whose land I live and have written this blog post. I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. Here page 79 is blank except for the title of the book’s third section, ‘Between earth and sky’, so I’m looking at the facing page.
