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Magdalena Ball’s High Wire Step

Posted on 31 Aug 2026 | 7 comments

Magdalena Ball, High Wire Step (Flying Island 2018)

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.

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The Travelling Soul

Posted on 29 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Josh Stenberg & Lap Lam, editors and translators, The Travelling Soul: Chinese Poetry in Australia (1931–1934) (Flying Islands 2026)

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.

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Eunice Andrada’s Kontra

Posted on 28 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Eunice Andrada, Kontra (Giramondo 2025)

Kontra, the third book of poetry by Eunice Andrada, has won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry and is shortlisted for other wards, 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-put of its implications, sometimes as if offering a subclause as on this page, sometimes in extended narrative verse. The brevity of the response on this page builds on the narrative of family suffering that 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 is speak 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 ingeneral, 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 diference

‘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.

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Gillian Rubinstein’s Screaming and Euphoria

Posted on 22 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

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.

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D G Lloyd’s Still alive in Dubbo

Posted on 21 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

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.

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.

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Brian Purcell’s Leaving

Posted on 20 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Brian Purcell, The Leaving (Flying Island 2021)

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..

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Click Here for What We Do, Pam Brown

Posted on 19 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Pam Brown, Click Here for What We Do (Vagabond Press 2018)

This book was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2019. I must have bought my copy around then. I put it on top of the high bookcase in my room, where it joined the hundred or so books waiting to be read, but unlike some of them (like Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan) it had a strong likelihood of being taken down again. Alas, a slim volume, it slid down behind the bookshelf, where it stayed completely inaccessible until …

… we recently replaced the carpet. We emptied the bookshelves, put their contents in boxes, and moved boxes and bookshelves to another room. The book and I were reunited.

Such an accidental journey into obscurity and back couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate book. Interruptions, distractions, accidents abound in Pam Brown’s poetry. As she says on page 47, in ‘Left wondering’, the second of the four long poems that make up the book:

my attention's
__creaky scatterings assemble

__ __like iron shards 
__patterning around 
a weak magnetic field

It would be hard to find a better way of describing these poems. To read them is to have the sense of being immersed in a consciousness whose attention is scattered – you can feel a pattern forming, being disrupted, re-forming. Each of the long poems is broken up into many short sections separated by an asterisk. It’s often not clear how a section relates to the one before it: it might pick on a word that appears there and criticise it; it might make an associative leap; it might not connect at all. The poems’ speaker goes on plane trips, re-organises furniture in her house, chats with someone over coffee, engages with artists, writers, essayists, and quotes other poets. She is irritated by the ‘nightmarish greensleeves’ of Mr Whippy. It all feels wonderfully familiar to me – not so much the content (I’d never heard of Agnes Martin or Luis Alberto Arellano), as the way one’s mind wanders, hovers. circles, and sometimes gets somewhere. And while it feels spontaneous and random, at the same time there’s discipline in the making of the poems: they are a long way from being formless effusions.

The four poems in the book are ‘Combination soup’, ‘Left wondering’, ‘Susceptibility song’ and ‘A mockery’.

Page 79* is the first page of ‘Susceptibility song’:

It’s a nice, cosy set-up. The poem’s speaker is sitting up late at night, multitasking.

past one a.m.
___ you will have gone to bed

The word you is always interesting in a poem. Maybe at some level it always means the reader. But it also usually conjures up a third person, real or imaginary. If you here signifies a particular person, the poem never identifies them. The effect is simply to place the poem’s speaker in a relationship. Francis Webb once wrote that a poem is a meeting place of silences: the first two lines of this one set it up to be exactly that.

The next section, the rest of the page, expands the scene-setting:

the night like a night
___________ some moonlight 
___________ some indigo to black

sporadic traffic swoosh
__________ no slower than the day

television streaming
___________________ comfortably

an average drama 
______ sound down low__________ 

not watching

reading bits of a book 
_____ making notes

I like ‘the night like a night’. It’s as if the poem starts out intending to give us an evocative simile but then thinks better of it: ‘Nah, it was just a night like any other.’ And gives just a little splash of colour. The qualifiers on the rest of the page emphasise the ordinariness of the moment: sporadic, average, comfortably. She’s not reading a book but bits of one. The television is on, but she’s not watching. It’s a kind of limbo.

A perfect place for the mind to go wandering, and an opening that makes one want to read on.

There are ten more pages.

First, there’s the book the poem’s speaker is ‘reading bits of’, in effect some of the notes she is making. She quotes a line from the blurb,’the discarded ideograms of history’, wonders what it means, decides the word ‘ideogram’ has been used incorrectly, explaining why in a two-word parenthesis – ‘ezra’s dictum’. I’m usually a pretty lazy reader, but because I’m blogging about the poem I looked things up. There are enough details to enable the book to be identified as Avenue (2012) a collection of poems by Michael O’Brien which is online at this link, so that we can read the two poems referred to by this poem; the blurb is by Geoffrey O’Brien; Ezra, of course, is Ezra Pound, who contended that ideograms were valuable as ways to resist ‘the lure of abstraction’, not whatever the blurb says they are.

But it wasn’t necessary to find all that out to enjoy the poem: the speaker picks up on the phrase, ‘the discarded ideograms of history,’ and the rest of the poem takes off on a meandering rumination on memory, history, time, the anthropocene, Queer Theory. She notices (is distracted by?) a spider ‘coating an insect in spittle’. She dreams, and watches TV. She gives some markers of time and place – including that she is writing on the night daylight saving ends, but at 10.52, a different time and presumably date from the opening page. She quotes, with acknowledgement, Yothu Yindi, Ellen van Neerven, Luis Buñuel and Les Murray, among others. Bob Dylan needs no acknowledgement:

tonight
____as I stand
inside the rain

irresolute

susceptible to uncertainty

She lists a number of terrorist killings from the news and then, in a piece of self-questioning that is quintessential Pam Brown:

does 
a list 
like that 
do any work?

____*

that's a question 
__ you've been asking
____for half a century

(wondering
___who'll be swift
________-to chide)

(This you is probably Brown herself, not the person addressed in the poem’s first lines.)

The poem is a wonderful ride, not really an essay, but more than a collection of moments or string of associations. If I seem to be saying nothing particularly clear about it, maybe that’s appropriate. Here’s how it ends, with a reminder that the subject it has been circling is to do with history, memory, finding a way of speaking :

the factual archive
the fatuous archive
____________awaits
the enormous familiar

begin whispering –

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the currently blue-skied land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Jill Jones’s How to Emerge

Posted on 15 Aug 2026 | 3 comments

Jill Jones, How to Emerge (Vagabond Press 2025)

Jill Jones is a formidable poet, sometimes thrilling, often difficult, never cliché or dull.

Like many of her previous books, How to Emerge has won awards (including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2026 NSW Literary Awards) and been shortlisted for others (most recently the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, winner to be announced on the 10th of September).

Some quotes from judges’ comments may give you a sense of the poetry, and also of the difficulty of describing it.

From the PM’s Literary Awards (for the full comments, click on the book’s cover at this link):

Advancing by non-propositional proposition, chances and crossings, How To Emerge is an absorbing, elegant collection of poetic numbers operating at the threshold of the personal and the impersonal. In its richly suggestive representation of worldly entanglement, it solicits readers willing to enter into a pact of mutual attention and unpredictable exchange. 

From the NSW Literary Awards (the full comments are at this link):

These poems discover humanity, perhaps even meaning in the accumulating weight of the world; we are star dust, but we are also the brat summer. Part of the appeal of these poems is the rare faith they show in the reader, a belief that readers will find their own meaning and carry from the collection something of the warmth, humour and care that radiates from the poems.

I won’t add any generalisations of my own, except to say that I like the idea that readers have to be ‘willing’ (PMLA judges) and ‘will find their own meaning’ (NSWLA judges).

I’ll just look at one poem, ‘Poem Mourning My Name’, on page 79*.

It has fifteen lines. According to an endnote, all the poems in the book ‘are composed of lines that are multiples of three’. I’m guessing this was a self-imposed restraint, important in creating the poems, but not so much in the reading of them, unless at a subliminal, numerological level.

Before you read on, please stop and read the poem itself, preferably aloud. You’ll get a sense of its flow, its general effect, and if you’re like me, you’ll feel an itch to look more closely, poke around in it, figure out what precisely is happening. The rest of this blog post is an attempt to record some of that looking, poking and figuring.

When I was thinking about the poem, I happened to hear Florence Knapp discussing her novel The Names in a Sydney Writers’ Festival podcast (at this link). That novel tells three life stories, each of the same boy, but he is given a different name in each with massive consequences for how his life goes. And I realised that in various contexts my name has been Jonny, Jonno, Shaw, Shawrie, [offensive nickname deleted], John, Jon, Jacko (just for one weekend) and Jonathan. Names are important, and perhaps everyone can tell a story about theirs.

What if you’re called Jill Jones? I stopped counting when I reached the 200th person with that name on Facebook. This commonness could be what leads to the poem’s opening. Surely, you might think, if your name is a marker of your untransferable individuality, it must be more distinctive than that. In my reading of the poem, that’s the starting point – the fantasy that behind the everyday name there is another, ‘real’ name:

What is my real name, is it a name of the dead 
___ something to fling off like an old coat, a translation 
of a dream, a river, a fairytale, a rock or tree?

Is it too hard to remember, or a joke that's barely 
___ cute? Is it a message someone deleted? It's strange 
on my tongue, like an old lover, a lack of neatness.

As in many of Jill Jones’s poems, these lines are full of allusion. Some people are named after dead ancestors, or from a parent’s dream. Fairytales about names abound – I was just telling my grandson about Rumpelstiltskin this week. There’s a popular belief that in some cultures babies are named for the first thing the mother sees after giving birth – a rock or tree. And there’s a joke that’s ‘barely cute’ that relates to that belief – which I won’t tell here because I try to keep the blog family friendly.

While this play is going on, a different understanding of the opening question swims beneath the surface. Is a name something other than an arbitrary word used to identify the person? Is a real name an inversion of what the trans community calls a dead name? In the second triplet, that unease comes closer to the surface: the deleted message, the strangeness on the tongue, the awkwardness of an old lover, something that doesn’t fit though maybe it did once in a time that’s forgotten.

It is this imagined-forgotten name that is being mourned.

The next lines, coming after after a visual break, are a kind of prayer.

Call me by the name I was, tell me I'm part of a pattern 
___the constellations, some kind of DNA.

Was I once a fish, a horse, a sparrow, a red red rose?

The ‘real name’ has become ‘the name I was’: it’s more than a label, it’s a metaphor for lost identity, a way of understanding the speaker’s place in the universe, but one that’s in the past. We name stars by their place in constellations. DNA is a deep identifier. But the last line here does a kind of twist. After a glancing, fanciful reference to reincarnation, it pulls back from that rabbit-hole and allows a rose to enter the poem. In European poetry, a rose can’t be mentioned without invoking a long tradition: here the phrase is taken from Robert Burns (‘My love is like a red red rose’) but it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare (‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’) and Gertrude Stein (‘A rose is a rose is a rose’), both of which, with their understanding that names are arbitrary, oppose the main argument.

After another visual break, the poem makes a new start, perhaps responding to that skepticism:

I can breathe without my name, that's good, so it's not 
___ something I need tell anybody. Not even as a story 
forged awkwardly. And no-one has come anyway.

But it's still something to hide away, a riddle half-buried 
___ by a loch that's too narrow, too deep. Even underneath
where there are signs, there are layers and bones.

A paraphrase: Assuming that there was a real name in the past, I don’t need it to go on with life; I don’t even need to tell anybody, and that’s just as well as no one would want to hear me anyhow. But …

Is this what the PMLA judges meant by a ‘non-propositional proposition’? Maybe it’s nonsense to think I had a ‘real’ name, now lost, and that knowing it would reveal something essential about myself. But somehow the idea won’t go away: it lingers in some half-buried part of consciousness.

There’s a fresh twist in the last sentence. The poem to this point has been a lament for a lost name, a lost sign. But even when there are signs, it says,there are layers of meaning in them. (Which brings me back to the stories I could tell (perhaps awkwardly) about the variations on my own unforgotten and unmourned name.

Through all of this strangely abstract rumination, there are things: a coat, a river, a rock, a tree, a fish, a horse, a sparrow, a rose, and in the end bones.

We keep being told that there’s a crisis in our culture to do with shrinking attention spans. A remedy that’s often suggested is to read long-form writing like novels. A poem as short as 15 lines can also invite – and reward – sustained, active attention.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the currently cold, wet land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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

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Toby Fitch’s Ill Lit Pop

Posted on 7 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Toby Fitch, Ill Lit Pop (Flying Island Poets 2018)

There’s a thing in contemporary poetry where a poem is created by doing something to another piece of writing. A mechanical example is n+7, in which every noun in the original passage is replaced by the seventh noun after it in the dictionary. Depending what dictionary you use, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ might become, ‘Fringes, romps, courage, lend me your earshot.’

There are other, less mechanical techniques. In a cento, a form that has been around for a very long time, each line of the new poem is made up of a line from another poem. There are erasures, cut-ups, flarf (see Wikipedia description here), and more. They can be fun and challenging to do, and the results can be intriguing, hilarious, or sometimes just plain mystifying to read.

Toby Fitch does a lot of that kind of thing. His book before Ill Lit Pop was The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press 2016) – say its name aloud and you might realise that the book has something to do with Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. In 2021’s Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, my blog post here), he applies N+ 7 viciously to some Scott Morrison’s speeches.

Ill Lit Pop includes similar play. An end note lists ‘sources’ for each of the book’s 21 poems. They all do something to – or with, or through – other pieces of writing. The ‘sources’ include Kurt Cobain, Ice House, Taylor Swift, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. If my reading of the book’s title is correct, it suggests that many of the poems take pop lyrics and make them obscure, as in poorly illuminated pop music.

Probably the poem that speaks most directly to me is ‘Let’s Dance’ [or, as the contents pages puts it, ‘Let’s Dance (da da-da-da da-da-da)’], a more or less traditional poem responding to David Bowie’s fabulous video of his song by that name. It begins:

It wasn't Stravinsky's rite of spring
to plonk Uluru on his album cover
but it led Bowie to the beach-blonde pub
summer dance-off

To read the rest of the poem you’ll have to find a copy of the book. You can see the video at this link.

In the less traditional poems, I generally find myself bemused.

Page 47* will give you a taste. It’s the last page of ‘Evening of the Bot Man’, which has the explanatory subtitle ‘(A bad lip reading of Rimbaud)‘. The note on sources names ‘selected lines of Le bateau ivre, Arthur Rimbaud’.

I think I get the idea of bad lip reading. Here’s how I imagine this poem was created. Toby Fitch watched someone perform Le bateau ivre, probably in the original French, with the sound turned down, and wrote words in English that roughly fitted what he saw. Then, I’m guessing, he read through what he had written and selected the bits that looked interesting, tidied them up a bit, and perhaps nudged them towards some kind of meaning. Maybe it’s a process a little like reading tealeaves or playing with a ouija board. Or like interpreting dreams – the lipreader’s unconscious mind surely has a role in deciding what words to see.

I don’t think there’s much point to reading it alongside Rimbaud’s poem – I tried and failed. The title, ‘Evening of the Bot Man’, could be a tidied-up version of ‘the bot man’s evening’, which is a plausible bad lip reading of ‘le bateau ivre’. Such comparative reading for the rest of the poem would be a lot of work, and probably not very productive. So the poem needs to be read in its own right.

In the first four pages, nothing makes obvious sense, but there are some wonderful surrealist phrases.A random sample includes ‘tweeting pics / of the cooked black rain’, ‘icy poles exalting / among purple columns of lard’, or ‘July fizzing w/ quadrupeds’. But a narrative thread emerges from the apparent chaos. The poem is addressed to someone, and the speaker has done something he regrets:

a single sexy night saw me regret
___________________________the fallout of my life
's pleasure dome
__________________________u shivered non-plussed
the Furies all slow-clapped
our marriage

Such is the nature of the piece that as I read I wondered if it was me or Toby Fitch who decided that was part of a through narrative line. Whichever, oncec I’ve seen it, it’s definitely there, and the poem continues with self-recrimination and perhaps some excuse-making.

So these final lines, on page 47, read almost coherently, beginning with a meta moment:

_______love needs a narrative to absorb

People need narratives – and the nominally arbitrary process of bad lip reading has urned one up.

_______the moon is atrocious w/ its solar mains
you & i both know
__________________desire is beastly in the flesh

These lines invoke the biblical phrase, ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,’ putting it in an astronomical rather than theological context – the moon in relationship to the sun. ‘There’s a hint of forgiveness in ‘you and I both know’. And so …

& so we're content
______________all the better to awkward you w/
night-night selfie
___________________________on the bed next to me
_________yr disappointment eyes

The issue – arising from that ‘single sexy night’ – is not resolved. Things are still awkward. The speaker and his spouse have reached an awkward detente. Disappointment is still there, but so is contentment.

None of which has anything to do with the Rimbaud’s most famous Symbolist poem, whose surface narrative is all about a boat sailing drunkenly down a river. Rimbaud has provided the text from which the new text has arisen. If you can find the poem I’d love to hear other people’s readings of it.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post 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, 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. When a book has fewer than 79 pages, as this one does, I look at page 47, the year of my birth minus 1900.

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Laurie Duggan’s Kite Hangs above the Border

Posted on 22 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Laurie Duggan, A Kite Hangs above the Border, translated into Chinese by Chris Song and Matthew Cheng (Flying Island Books 2022)

Flying Island Books are published jointly by ASM and Cerberus Books. The first of those publishers is based in Macao, the second in Markwell, a rural community in New South Wales whose population in 2021 was 144. The series consists mostly of English-language poetry, but there are a number of bilingual books, mostly bringing Chinese-language poets to Australian readers. This is the second book I’ve read that reverses the flow. The first was Geoff Page’s Codicil (link is to my blog post), which was translated, like A Kite Hangs above the Border, by Hong Kong poets Chris Song and Matthew Cheng. This book, like that one, may act as a taster to potential Chinese readers. For readers who can’t decipher Chinese characters, it offers the intriguing experience of seeing what the poems look like in translation. And given that many non-Chinese readers won’t have read much of Laurie Duggan’s poetry, it’s a taster for us as well.

I’ve written longish posts about Duggan’s work here and here, which I’ve just reread and can recommend if you want a bit of background.

This book includes a number of poems from his two long-running series, Blue Hills and Allotments. Both series reflect the influence of classic Chinese poetry: they are often sharp, minimalist evocations of a moment in time in a particular place, generally Australia in Blue Hills and England in Allotments. For instance, the opening lines of ‘Blue Hills 86’:

_______________________a rectangle of sky
lights the kitchen bench

shadows of screeching corellas
cross this space

(Intriguingly, it takes 16 characters to translate the seven words of that second couplet there, six for ‘cross this space’ alone.)

There are satirical comments on current events, poems about poetry, travel poems, all quietly self-effacing and sometimes sharply witty.

Pages 78–79* feature one of the travel poems, ‘Catacombs’:

It’s interesting to notice that the word ‘catacombs’ needs four characters in Chinese, and that the last three couplets resemble each other visually in a way the English don’t (and seeing from a quick run through Google translate that this visual effect seems to be deliberate).

I thought I knew about catacombs before reading this poem. I’ve visited the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, Portugal (and ventured a little verse translation of my own, at this link), and the Hypogeum in Malta. Neither those, nor photos from the Paris catacombs, fit these lines. But a quick search turned up the Cappuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which the TripSavvy website says are ‘not recommended for the squeamish or for children’. It’s as if this poem condensed out of the air of that place.

If you’re not the squeamish type, you might like to watch this short video about the Palermo catacombs. But do read the poem first. It’s short lines – using fewer words than the video – create a visual sense of the place and allow its emotional resonances to hang lightly about the words.

The poem is in three parts. First, a general description:

They grin or howl, 
heads twisted from bodies

each hangs forward 
unsupported by neck muscle

There’s initial shock of the grinning or howling skulls. Is it that some grin and others howl, or is the poem undecided whether to describe them as grinning or howling? It doesn’t matter which way you read it, that ‘or’ holds you back from a pure horror movie response. The second couplet has a cool, practical feel. There’s a simple anatomical cause for the potentially horrible twisting in the first couplet: there is no neck muscle.

The second part notices the range of corpses. I’ve just spent some time reading about these catacombs, and I am in awe of Duggan’s restraint in not mentioning the child corpses, especially the beautifully preserved two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo. That would be a different poem. This one focuses on what amounts to class:

some in bow ties 
some in moth-eaten trousers

those in the professions 
have their own aisles

those of the cloth 
the darkest spaces

Incidentally, I ran the translation through Google translate, and the bot’s version of Chris Song and Matthew Cheng’s translation of ‘those of the cloth’ is ‘the commoner’, that is, the couplet refers to common people rather than the clergy, so whether by the machine or by the weird interplay of languages, class looms larger in the translation, or at least in the retranslation of the translation.

And then the observation:

all are covered 
by thick dust

The poem has no need to spell out the metaphorical resonance here (‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, and so on). As the US poet said, ‘No ideas but in things.’ The absence of punctuation at the end leaves it up to the reader – we can take it as implying a rumination on death as the great leveller, or simply let it stand as a tourist’s note.

So that’s a taste of a taste. Having written this far, I’ve picked up my copy of Homer Street (2020) and am browsing happily as I press ‘Publish’.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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

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