Tag Archives: poetry

Pam Brown’s text thing

Posted on 29 Apr 2026 | 3 comments

Pam Brown, text thing (Little Esther Books 2002)

Since 1972, Pam Brown has published 23 books of poetry and almost as many chapbooks (chapbooks are tiny books of poetry, mostly too small to be given an ISBN). She has won major prizes, been an editor including for Jacket and Overland, and is a generous reader of other people’s books.

I enjoy her poetry, but I’m perplexed when it comes to writing about it. Before sitting down to write about Text Thing, approximately her eighteenth book, I looked back over my blog to see what I’d already written. It turns out there’s quite a lot, much revealing the extent of my ignorance about contemporary poetry. If the spirit moves you to read them, here are links to my encounters with Selected Poems 1972–1981, True Thoughts (2008), Home by Dark (2013), Missing Up (2016) and Stasis Shuffle (2021).

There are plenty of places you can go for illuminating accounts of Brown’s poetry. I especially like her 2003 interview with John Kinsella in Jacket2 where he memorably suggests that she has created her own subculture. Among many interesting things in that interview, she says something that’s relevant to page 79* of this book. Referring to the way her poems often include the names of friends without explanation, Brown says:

The … thing is that they’re signifiers. And somehow it’s also a call for community. That sounds corny and old-fashioned but poetry is a marginal art and we’re like the black market of culture — it lends a freedom to do that… include real people, names…

The poem that begins on page 79 is ‘The Night’:

And there are three lines over the page:

nothing cosy
about you.

(curses!)

This poem is uncharacteristically straightforward. Including the title, it consists of a single sentence whose syntax is almost simple enough to meet a primary schoolteacher’s specifications, followed by a one word exclamation. The poem’s speaker eats a pickled onion and is reminded of a friend (or perhaps a frenemy or a former lover?). She indulges in a little rant addressed to that person.

It makes me laugh and I’m not exactly sure how.

Maybe the poem invites me to imagine it being read by the person it’s addressed to. Would she/they (I’m assuming it’s not a man) be amused? Defensive? Dismissive? Retaliate in a poem of her own?

Having now read it a number of times, I realise that there’s quite a lot going on.

The night

Denis bought
Ken's painting 
of a barcode
I ate a pickled onion

This opening clause sets the scene. I imagine the opening night of an art exhibition in a small gallery. Art is on sale and there are snacks, including pickled onions. ‘Ken’ is almost certainly Ken Bolton, poet and painter, named on the imprint page as the publisher of this book artist Ken Searle [see comment from Ken Bolton] . ‘Denis’ is probably a real person too, but his identity doesn’t matter, any more than that of the poem’s ‘you’ does. What does matter is that all four people in the poem – ‘I’, ‘you’, Ken and Denis – are on first-name terms, and seem to belong to some kind of creative community – perhaps Brown’s ‘black market of culture’. Only when I read the poem out loud (to the long-suffering Emerging Artist) did I realise that there’s a lovely contrast between the briefly mentioned masculine, transactional world of buying and selling where even the artwork is an emblem of commerce, and the feminine, relational world of the rest of the poem.

I ate a pickled onion 
& thought of you 
you sourpuss

Is it ridiculous of me to compare Brown’s pickled onion to Proust’s madeleine? Probably. But the taste of this pickled onion, like the smell of the madeleine, transports the poem’s speaker from the external world to the internal one of emotion-charged memory. The word ‘sourpuss’ explains the connection. Then there’s something disarming in the string of qualities, each introduced by an ampersand, with the attention-grabbing words ‘squeam’ (which Merriam-Webster says is a back formation from ‘squeamish’) and ‘demotics’ (which in this context I take to mean the adoption of working-class manners and language, like a recent Australian Prime Minister giving himself an Aussie-sounding nickname). There’s a nice comedy in the transition from criticising an off-putting quest for power and calculated manner to a silly schoolyard insult: 

& your
squeam-inducing 
quest for power 
& your 
fake demotics
& your 
too big 
plastic hairpin 
which doesn't
suit you

You almost expect that to go ‘which doesn’t / suit you / anyway‘ with a teenage emphasis. The first two insults carry the ring of truth. The third reflects back on the speaker.

Learned people refer to Pam Brown’s gift for sprezzatura, a casual appearance that conceals the work that went into it. The veering off in the next line – the fifth to start with an ampersand – is a nice example. I can’t read the opening ‘& also’ without thinking of an angry teenager. Brown’s world of allusion is almost certainly more sophisticated than mine – but I think of Mary-Anne Fahy’s gum-chewing Kylie Mole from the 1990s. (Come to think of it, this book was published in 2002, so Kylie Mole may well have been in Brown’s mind.) So it feels like an easy, natural follow-on from the big plastic hairpin. Then, as if it’s a perfectly natural next step, the poem turns into an intimate attack:

& also
you don't know 
how to
warm eggs
on the outside

Well, maybe it’s not explicitly intimate, but the lines do suggest a shared domesticity in the past. I’m not sure what it means to ‘warm eggs / on the outside’. This conjured in my mind in image of hands holding eggs gently, imparting body heat to them. Why anyone would want to do that, or why not knowing how to do it was a moral failure wasn’t immediately clear. Then I reflected that if you’re baking a cake, a pavlova, or even an omelette, it’s a good idea to let the eggs warm up for a while ‘on the outside’ of the fridge: so there’s a practical meaning. But – for me at least – the image of motherly, protective, feminine warmth persists. And that justifies the final twist of the knife: 

because there's
nothing cosy
about you.

I’m not usually one to notice perfectly conventional punctuation, but I love that full stop at the end. Back in 2002, Millennials probably weren’t yet expressing horror at Boomers’ ending text messages with a full stop, which they saw as unreasonably aggressive. This one fits their reading perfectly.

The full stop may the end of the rant, but it’s not the end of the poem:

(curses!)

The exclamation is a response to everything that has gone before. I love how many ways it can be read: ‘(Did I really just say that?)’, ‘(Do I still have all these feelings about her?)’, ‘(I was having such a nice time before I bit that pickled onion!)’, ‘Why did I ever let her into my life?)’. Or: ‘(And now I hurl curses in your direction!)’, ‘(I’ll sum it all up in the one word!)’. Given that Pam Brown often quotes from other poets and popular culture, or even odd bits of graffiti or commercial copy, it doesn’t seem wrong to hear an echo of comics like Popeye here. No time at all on Google gave me an example.

That’s just one poem. If I were to find a way that it’s representative of the whole book, I’d say it’s something about interruption. The cover illustration, attributed to Kurt Brereton, is of graffiti that reads ‘wile you are reeding th’. The book is full of interruptions, asides, distractions. ‘The Night’ can be read as being about one more distraction. But such a rich one!

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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

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Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Posted on 31 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, (with more ways) (New Directions 2016)

This book must be a classic work on translating poetry. Readers of this blog will know that occasionally I nerd out about translation. Well, Eliot Weinberger does it in spades, only he’s wittier, more erudite and generally much more illuminating.

The book looks at nearly 30 attempts to translate one four-line poem by the classic Chinese poet Wang Wei (c 700–761 CE), mostly into English. The poem is generally but not always, such is the nature of translation, known as ‘The Deer Park’.

Before looking at any of the attempts, there are three short sections presenting and discussing: the original, in Chinese characters, just five on each line; a transliteration into modern pinyin; and a character-by-character translation onto English. To give you some idea of the challenge facing the translator, here is the first line of the character-by-character translation:

Empty_ mountain(s)/hill(s)  (negative)_ to see _ person/people

You can see that the possibilities are vast – and in discussing the different solutions, Weinberger has a lot of fun and at the same time gives an impressionistic account of the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry on English language poetry in the last 100 years. He doesn’t mind taking on the Chinese language specialists who may know about the language but have no ear for poetry, and he doesn’t hold back with either praise or displeasure.

I’d written to this point when I remembered that I blogged about J. P. Seaton’s Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry almost exactly 16 years ago, and did my own timid, partial, uneducated attempt at comparing versions – of a slightly longer poem by Li Po (701–762). If you’re interested, it’s at this link.

In short, I loved this book, and if you’re interested in Chinese poetry and /or translation in general, you will too. I’m very grateful to John Levy for mentioning it in the comments (at this link).

I’ll give the last word to Weinberger. At the end of the original essay – before Octavio Paz had contributed his learned Afterword, and before Weinberger’s account of a Furious Professor’s response – he writes:

The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different – not merely another – reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.

I am an Australian-born man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nationa. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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Jennifer Maiden’s Mandatory Sentence

Posted on 19 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Jennifer Maien, Mandatory Sentence (Quemar Press 2026)

Mandatory Sentence is the latest in Jennifer Maiden’s continuing tightrope act of producing a book of poetry at the start of each year. As in previous years, most of its contents are in effect occasional poems, that is, poems written in response to breaking news – developments in the Gaza genocide, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, Anthony Albanese’s visit to China, news about AI, and so on. Many of the poems feature fictional or historical characters responding to these events, sometimes in dialogue with current politicians.

If you’re new to Maiden’s poetry, you might need help with the characters who populate the book. George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, familiar from Maiden’s four novels and many poems, appear with their ever-increasing family that includes a son named Corbyn and a number of animals. There’s a weird, cuddly little creature named Brookings – named after the Brookings Institute and originally perhaps emblematic of what Maiden sees as that organisation’s deliberate naivety, but now taking on a life of its own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt and other make brief repeat appearances. Maiden’s daughter Katharine, has appeared in her mother’s poetry since The Winter Baby (1990) – as well as being the book’s publisher in real life.

I read Mandatory Sentence just after my first reading of Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot. They’re very different books, but they both respond with some immediacy to world events from a left / progressive perspective, so it’s not surprising that there are moments when they chime. One such moment is the opening of ‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’, which echoes that of Araluen’s ‘Uplock Actuator System’. For this blog post, I’ll stay there.

Both poems were evidently inspired by the same interview Richard Marles gave on the ABC in August last year – at this link – in which he asserted repeatedly that Australia does not supply weapons to Israel, but is ‘part of the F-35 process’. Neither poem is limited to satirising that assertion – the Shovel does that brilliantly, here. How they each make distinctive poetry from the material is interesting.

‘Uplock Actuator System’ begins:

We aren't sending weapons, they said, 
just the only lock for the only door that 
opens when they are fired from the air.

The poem progresses in nine three-line stanzas of almost intolerable intensity, evoking the suffering of Gaza and linking it to the ‘parallel occupation’ of Australia and the unwilling complicity of all of us. It ends with a call to engagement .

‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’ is by comparison laid-back and playful, adjectives I wouldn’t easily associate with Maiden’s political poems. You can hear her performing it, pretty much deadpan, at this link. Here’s how it appears in Mandatory Sentence:

It begins with the titular Brookings – a ‘small fur baby wombat-possum cross’ who could have come from a children’s cartoon – watching the television, cutely ‘like a kindergarten’. And there’s some almost silly play on words – the word ‘cross’ appears three times, each with a different meaning.

The small fur baby wombat-possum cross 
sits watching Marles on the ABC say we send no arms 
to Israel. Brookings is at present tired and cross 
sitting with his four legs crossed in attention 
like a kindergarten,

The adult shorthand – ‘Marles on the ABC’ – alerts us that this is not a cute and cuddly poem. Contemporary Australian readers will know that this is Richard Marles, Minister for Defence, and the context is Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza (the context has moved on since the book was published – but the poem’s concerns are still sharply relevant). The language of political denial-not-denial is skewered in just three lines.

like a kindergarten, so I probably should not 
have stirred him up by explaining that 
Australia does not send whole weapons but
the doors for bomb bays in their planes
which it replaces as often as they ask.

The poem’s central tension is set up: on one hand, there’s the innocent, naive, playful fantasy creature and on the other the poem’s speaker who is aware that the Australian government is complicit in terrible things.

For the next 14 lines, the rest of the first page, innocent Brookings plays. In the Brookings poems – this book also includes ‘Brookings Becomes a False Flag’ – it’s clear Maiden’s invented character is not simply a mouthpiece for the poet but has an independent imaginary existence. (This may not be obvious with other Maiden characters, but I think it’s always true – Maiden sets her imagined people/creatures up and is interested to see what they have to say – what, for instance, would Dietrich Bonhoeffer say to Kevin Rudd this time? Do I need to say that Bonhoeffer isn’t as cute as Brookings?)

Brookings’s metaphorical origins may be at work in the background, suggesting that liberal organisations like the Brookings Institution aren’t serious about addressing things like genocide. Nerdily, I went to the Institution’s website to see what it was up to at about the time this poem was published – and while it wasn’t playing at being a bomb bay door (or a Bombay door with beads and velvet curtain), it was hosting a discussion about the future of drone warfare (link here). Make of that what you will.

But the poem doesn’t mount an argument about the Brookings Institution. It just gives a picture of innocent, or at least oblivious, playfulness.

There’s a turn, and in the second part of the poem the narrative moves to bedtime, which is a pretext for introducing Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This might seem a bit forced, but if you can accept a ‘fur baby wombat-possum cross’ then why not also accept War and Peace as its ‘best book’?

Embarrassingly, I haven’t read War and Peace (though I saw the King Vidor movie on Super 8 in 1964 and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn). Other readers will know what specific bearing the scene from the novel has on the rest of the poem:

He’ll ask I read him the bit in War and Peace
he likes best at the moment when
Natasha clears belongings from the cart
to make room for some wounded men
as the Rostovs' Moscow house is left
so Kutuzov can defeat Napoleon.

But those of us who haven’t read the novel can still see/feel how it works in the poem.

The War and Peace moment is juxtaposed with the image of Tolstoy at the time when he wrote it:

Tolstoy never fails to soothe
with his independent post-view of
history in its merciful details as
in reality he sits in his wooded plantation
under a tree to school some gathered children.

As often happens with poems, it seems as if this one has gone wandering, from Marles to Brookings, to War and Peace, to Tolstoy sitting with children under a tree. Then the next couple of lines bring it home:

The ABC of Marles does not interplay vision
of children firebombed in tents or shot
in line for food

The poem has interplayed vision of Tolstoy schooling children in a safe ‘independent post-view of / history’ with a scene from his great novel. If tha ABC was to interplay vision of children with the Marles interview, those children would not be safely ‘post-history’ but concurrent with the interview, victims of atrocity. The tension in the opening lines between child-like naivety and a violent reality comes to a head here.

Incidentally, ‘the ABC of Marles’ seems at first to be a slightly odd way of saying ‘Marles on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’, but it can also read, less oddly, as ‘the alphabet of Marles’ – that is, the evasive language Marles uses.

The poem doesn’t go to graphic description of the atrocities – it gives enough to let us know the heaviness that sits in the speaker.

But – and it’s an important question – what is a parent or quasi parent to do? The speaker allows Brookings to continue in ignorance, and the poem ends with the peaceful image of mother and not-quite-child at bedtime;

And now he rests his furry heavy head
in its impossible softness up against my arm
and I read to him again from his best book,
which he opens and shuts a few times first,
transfers to it his bomb bay doorway function

Just two things complicate the image and provoke further thought and feeling.

First, the word ‘impossible’ suggests that, just as any soothing Tolstoy has to offer is dubious because he was writing from a safe historical distance, so any comfort afforded by Brookings is illusory because he is after all an invention, an impossibility.

And second, the last line: what does it mean that the ‘bomb bay doorway function’ can be transferred to a book? What is released when a book ‘opens and shuts’? If you’ve read this far, you probably have as good an answer to that question as I have and together we could probably come up with better ones. I’m reminded of a long history of assertions of the power of the word. There’s the proverbial: ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword’, ‘You can kill a person but you can’t kill an idea,’ and so on. The idea seems to be everywhere just now that the narratives we tell are crucial: we can believe the story coming from the White House, or commit ouselves to a different story. That final image gestures towards this kind of thinking. Perhaps what is released in those last lines is the possibility of resistence.

It’s not a call to arms like Evelyn Araluen’s poem, but it is a call to think, to reject double-talk, maybe even to hope.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the nights are lating longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* When blogging about a book, I currently focus on page 79, which is my age. Mandatory Sentence has just 70 pages, so I gave myself permission to go with a whim.

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Evelyn Araluen’s Rot

Posted on 10 Mar 2026 | 4 comments

Evelyn Araluen, The Rot (University of Queensland Press 2025)

This is a brilliant follow-up to Evelyn Araluen’s first book, Dropbear. It’s passionately raw, intellectually challenging, and full of rabbit-holes. Araluen says in her acknowledgements, ‘In most ways this is a book for girls.’ She goes on to say, ‘A girl is so many things. Everything, really.’ It’s pretty safe to say that I’m not a girl. But as an oldish man of settler heritage I was swept away.

Alison Croggon in the Guardian (at this link) called it ‘a hurricane of a book’ and says (among other things):

The Rot is an experiential plunge into the nightmare of the present moment, as seen through two centuries of colonisation on this continent. Dark though it is – as dark as our times – it is not hopeless. The book is dedicated to ‘my girls, and the world you will make’: Araluen looks to the ‘Long Future’, a term coined by the Unangax̂ scholar Professor Eve Tuck, for what can be imagined for those who survive colonisation – contingent and elusive as that future might be. At the core of this collection’s bitter truths beats a sublime tenderness.

[In case you need a footnote: Unangax̂ are the Indigenous people of the Aleutian islands. Some of the most powerful moments in Rot come when Araluen wrestles with the implications of Eve Tuck’s thinking. You don’t have to go down this tempting rabbit-hole to feel the full force of the poems.]

Araluen was recently interviewed by Sian Cain for the Guardian (at this link) when she won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Here’s a snippet:

She worked on The Rot ‘after work, after dinner, in the bath’ for months, though she now admits that such prolonged focus on such a traumatic subject was ‘irresponsible of me’.
‘I do not recommend drinking wine in the bath and listening to Mitski and crying and calling that a writing practice,’ she added.
The Rot reflects ‘a really panicked, distressed window of a time that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret,’ Araluen said.

[Mitski, another of the book’s many potential rabbit-holes, is a Japanese-American singer whose music has been described as a ‘wry running commentary on twentysomething angst, raw desire, and often unrequited love’ (link to Wikipedia article here).]

These quotes give an idea of the book’s tone and its scope, though there’s a lot that they don’t mention. For instance, the genocide in Gaza is a pervasive presence. I recommend that you read both the review and the article in full – and then I hope you’ll decide to read the book.

There’s so much to take in, so much to say, such complexity and intensity to untangle, so many rabbit-holes to be profitably explored. I’ll just offer a small note, keeping to my resolve to focus on one page.

Page 78* is the beginning of ‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’:

Before looking at the poem itself, it’s worth considering it in context. It’s title suggests that it is a direct response to an earlier poem. ‘You’ (page 25) ends:

no less human than yourself. Around us the
world sways, sometimes crumbles. It's not that
you think you can change this, but you need
something to do with your hands.

The hands motif turns up again in ‘Analysis Act Three’ (page 76), which launches itself with a quote from J H Prynne (from his 2022 lecture ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work‘, another potential rabbit-hole).

Prynne: no poet has or can have clean hands, because 
clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction.
Clean hands do no worthwhile work.

Sections viii and ix have this: (Apologies, but my WordPress theme doesn’t allow me to include section numbers as they ought to appear.)

Every day I ask myself what the machine doesn't want 
me to know. Every tomorrow will be the day I find a 
way to learn it. Every night I read poetry just to give 
my hands something to do.

Refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance are
tenors of a liveable life. In action they are compromised,
bloody-handed, in the world and of it.

The book is full of theory, grief and rage. But the motif of hands beings it down to earth: thinking and feeling are not enough. We need to work, to engage. Reading poetry can be work. So are ‘refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance’.

‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’ responds in the form of an instructional poem in 15 sections’. Page 78 has just the first two instructions:

First, verify. Count the fingers, the sharpness of the 
lines, check for smudges or extra limbs. Is there a blur?
A hollow aura where the wrong light strikes? What 
shadows loom from an open door? Wear eucalyptus 
on your wrist, invoke that old verse. Don't swallow
the fruit. Don't make deals with their kind.

Temple, brows, slide index fingers down the nasal canal, 
swipe thumbs under the eye. Push harder than you think you 
should. Swallow. It will hurt until it won't.

A quick and dirty summary of these sections would be something like: first, pay attention to your actual hands, and second, use them to become aware of yourself as physically present.

But this is poetry. The words matter. And they introduce an element of the uncanny, something that disturbs the prose meaning. ‘Check for smudges,’ Ok. I can do that, and it is an injunction to self-reflection: smudges – of ink, dirt, foodstuff – will show what I’ve been doing. But ‘check for extra limbs’? The mind goes wandering, and who knows where? Then the questions about light and shade ask the reader to notice their actual context, recognise that they are in a place, in relationship to whatever creates a looming shadow. (In my case right now, the shadows on my hands are cast by light from an open window.)

‘Wear eucalyptus’: fair enough. But what is the old verse we are to invoke? I lay that aside as another of the book’s potential rabbit-holes. If you have an idea, please say in the comments.

‘Don’t swallow the fruit’: I read this as referring to the tale where a person taken to a fairy land must not eat anything if they want to avoid being trapped there forever. That and the final sentence, ‘Don’t make deals with their kind,’ are warnings to keep one’s own integrity against the tide of disinformation and distraction that we live in – ‘Don’t drink the kool aid.’ Already the poem has moved quite a way from literal hands.

The second section comes back to the literal. It insists that the reader notice they are a body: that they push hard to make contact with their own physical existence.

I won’t discuss the rest in detail – the remaining sections cover how to acknowledge place; how to repair; how to cook; how to throw soil into a grave. They cover self-defence, self-care, first-aid, violence, tenderness, and finally connection. Section by section, the instruction form opens up possibilities, creates small and large riddles, resonates. Even Section 12, the shortest, ‘Pick up your fucking litter,’ repays a moment’s attention: the tone shifts and the speaker of the poem becomes for a moment an irritable Auntie. But the comic irritation doesn’t detract from the importance of the advice. Section 14, the second shortest section, is, among other things, a gloss on Section 2: ‘Remove your grip from your own throat.’ It’s one thing to push hard with your thumbs under your eyes until it hurts; it’s a different thing altogether to do violence against yourself, to stifle your own voice. I love Section 15, but it’s against my religion to quote the final line of a poem.

Do read the book if you get a chance.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Nam Le’s 36 ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

Posted on 24 Jan 2026 | 3 comments

Nam Le, 36 ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (2023)

I know that I’ve read and enjoyed Nam Le’s first book, The Boat, but I don’t seem to have blogged about it. In one of its early stories, a character who fled from Vietnam with his family as a young child in a dangerously overcrowded boat is now an emerging writer. He resists pressure from all sides to write from within the Vietnamese refugee identity. After several other stories, the book ends with ‘The Boat’, a version of the story the character has been hassled to write. Resist as you may, the collection as a whole seems to say, in the end you will write the kind of thing that people demand from you.

This book of poetry plays with the same dilemma. Interestingly enough, in the acknowledgements, Nam Le thanks Nick Feik, ‘who for years gave my poems a home in The Monthly‘ and goes on, ‘Those poems are not in this book, but they paved the way for these.’ That is to say, Nam Le has not been condemned to write only ‘Vietnamese poems’. He has chosen this task. The poems explores identity, history (including colonial history), autobiography, family relationships. They are full of painful exploration and playful, formal adventure.

Each poem is numbered and named for its ‘way of writing’, beginning with ‘[1. Diasporic]’ and including poems named for their poetic form such as ‘[3. Ekphrastic]’, for their subject matter ‘[12. Communist]’, with puns on their content ‘[Dire critical]’, and so on. Many titles include the word ‘Violence’.

I can’t say that I found all the poems accessible. But I understood and enjoyed more of them than Nam Le’s session at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival led me to expect (my blog post here). I love what J. M. Coetzee says on the back cover. To quote a little:

There is wit aplenty, of a dancing, ironic kind, but the fury and the bitterness that underlie 36 Ways come without disguise, as do its moments of aching love and loss.

The poem on page 47*, is ‘[26. Erasive]’. Normally, I’d photograph the spread where the poem appears and quote at least some of it, but in this case I’ll attempt a description instead.

Beneath the poem’s title is a subtitle in smaller all-caps type, ‘[ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA]‘. The rest of the spread consists of what appears to be 46 lines of prose, 23 on each page, that have been almost completely redacted – that is, the pages consist visually of two sets of 23 thick black lines.

There are 25 patches of un-erased text, each consisting of either a single letter or a pair of letters. They can be laboriously piece together to make two sentences:

Left-hand page: N o ar ch iv e is sa fe  
Right-hand page: Bu t is t h i s a l l t h er e is to i t.

The hunt through the archives turns up something, but leaves so much unknown.

This is powerfully evocative – especially just now, when the US Department of Justice has released hundreds of pages of the Epstein files completely blacked out. History is written by the victors, and the archives are controlled by those in power.

In the book I hold in my hand, the erased text on the left hand page is just legible. At least, to my eyes it hovers on the threshold of legibility. With a little help and a lot of squinting, I can tell you that the deleted script begins:

Newspaper Articles Almanacs Treatises (Scientific, Political,
Anthropological. Ethnological), Expedition Reports Ships Logs
Royal Proclamations Acts of Parliament Papal Bulls and Breves
Vatican Decrees Edicts Encyclicals Jesuit Relations

and – I’m leaving out the intervening lines – ends:

White Papers Green Papers Letters Patent Land Grants Titles
Medical Records Inventories Accounts Patents Estimates
of Expense Reports Settlement Proposals Petitions Notice
Dictionaries (Bilingual, Trilingual) Treaties Confessions Poems

I’ve bolded the only letters in those lines that are left un-erased.

Many (most?) erasure poems work on a given text to comment on it in some way – like ‘Sacrificed on Altar of Vice’ by Brittany Bentley in a recent Meanjin, or my own little exercise in my blog post on David Adès’s The Heart’s Lush Gardens. That’s not what’s happening here.

Here the underlying text is a list, composed as part of the poem, of the kinds of documents one finds in an archive. The poem enacts the process of sifting through the archives to find information, encountering colonialist-bureaucratic ways of seeing, from property documentation to papal bulls (the infamous Doctrine of Discovery comes to mind). Then, just as one might be feeling a little smug because, after all, I am the kind of person who reads poems, the last almost-erased word is ‘Poems’. Nam Le does not exclude himself from complicity.

That’s the first page. On the second page the erased text is completely illegible. Erasure is complete: we can never know what is hidden from history.

The more I looked (literally) into this poem, the more I appreciated its ingenuity. More importantly, the more I fond myself responding to its emotional and intellectual charge: ‘Erasure rhymes with Asia.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78. When, as here, a book has fewer than 78 pages, I focus on page 47 (I was born in 1947).

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Huang Fan’s Flower Ash

Posted on 16 Jan 2026 | 4 comments

Huang Fan, Flower Ash (translated by Josh Stenberg, Flying Island Books 2024)

Huang Fan is a Nanjing-based poet and novelist who has received many awards and prizes in his homeland, and has been described as the Chinese mainland poet of most interest to Taiwanese readers. His work has been widely translated, including into English. Flower Ash is a wonderfully accessible introduction to his work.

The Flying Islands website (at this link) quotes US novelist Phillip Lopate::

In these powerful, exquisite poems, Huang Fan, a major Chinese poet, takes stock of his life from the vantage point of middle age, finding deep connections with nature, but also rueful solitude, memories of lostness, and a lingering sense of missed opportunities. These translations beautifully capture a threnody of wonder and sadness which is the poet’s singular achievement.

It’s a bilingual book. On each spread, Josh Stenberg’s English version is on the left and Huang Fan’s original Chinese on the right. Perhaps partly because of this, I was always aware, as I read, that the real poem, over there on the right, was inaccessible to me. (A bilingual reader would of course have a very different experience.)

The poem ‘Mayfly’ on pages 78* and 79 is a good example:

Don’t you just wish you could read those beautiful lines of characters on the right-hand page?

The English, by contrast, feels unadorned. The first two lines lay out the poem’s central idea:

we too are mayflies, knowing the four seasons 
but living only in one season of a single day

Mayflies live for a single day. From some perspectives, our lives are similarly short.

The following lines present different images to represent the same idea: a lifetime is ‘a moment of the milky way’, the High Tang period (the eighth century CE, a golden age of Chinese poetry) is just a day, what we see as an ocean is just a stagnant puddle. And so on. It’s hard to see that anything much is happening that isn’t already there in the first lines.

I think the problem is translation. Not that Josh Stenberg’s translation is inadequate, on the contrary. But translation itself is problematic. I suspect the music of the original, and the visual play that’s happening in the ideograms, are simply untranslatable, and what we get is like a musical score, or a choreographer’s notes.

But even given all that, the poem takes an interesting turn:

with no chance to see the recesses of the mind 
we treat a dewdrop like a shatterproof heart

The imagery is no longer straightforward illustration of a straightforward idea. These lines open out to something deeper, less easily paraphrased. It’s no longer the perspective of deep time or deep space that is being evoked but the depths of the mind and the complexities of human emotion. If it mistaken to think of the dewdrop as a shatterproof heart, is there an implied heartbreak, an unfathomable sorrow – even ‘a threnody of wonder and sadness’?

After briefly returning to a catalogue of oppositions – breeze/gale, lily pads/islands – the poem lands on this:

it seems that only the trees shade, the haze in our eyes 
is praying: the leaves willing to fall from the branch 
have souls the same as us
seizing transience fast with all their life, safeguarding
------- the fleeting vanities

This doesn’t yield coherence easily. I confess I got some help – I went to Google translate, and found this:

It seems that there is only the shadow of the tree - the haze in our eyes 
is praying: may the leaves falling from the trees 
have the same heart as us 
Use your life to hold on to the short-lived and keep
------- the delusion of flying

Again, the Chinese text is a closed book to me, but to my ignorant eye, and to my astonishment, the robot makes better sense than the award-winning human translator. Instead of ‘only the trees shade’, which makes no easy sense, the mechanical translation has ‘there is only the shadow of the tree’ – that is, we don’t see the real world, but something like the shadows in Plato’s cave. Instead of the leaves ‘willing to fall’, it is the speaker who wills –’may the leaves falling’: it’s not a description but a prayer (which follows on from ‘praying’ at the start of the line). And in the last line it’s no longer the leaves ‘seizing transience’, but the reader being urged to do so. What we experience may be ‘fleeting vanities’ (much more resonant than ‘delusions of flying’, even though the latter fits the idea of falling leaves better), but it’s what we have, and we (‘you’ in the robot’s translation, ‘the leaves’ in the human’s) need to seize it fast / hold onto it.

I didn’t set out to do this, but I seem to have taken a single poem and demonstrated that reading poems in translation is fraught.

I did enjoy the book, and am glad that Flying Islands regularly include Chinese–English bilingual books.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Flying Island’s 100 Poets

Posted on 24 Dec 2025 | Leave a comment

Brian Purcell & Kit Kelen (editors), 100 Poets (Flying Islands 2025)

Most poetry anthologies are implicitly made up of poems that are ‘the best’ in some way or at least the editors’ favourites chosen from a much bigger field of lesser or less loved work. Though the editors of 100 Poets have necessarily been selective, the point here is not that these hundred poems are Winners. Instead, the book is offered as an introduction to a poetic community.

Flying Islands, the brainchild of Kit Kelen, is a non-profit publisher, and a community of poets and readers of poetry. Over the last decade and a half, they have published 100 pocket-sized books of poetry (I’ve read an enjouyed about 20). They have features award-winning poets, grumpy old poets who complain about the lack of recognition elsewhere, and brand new poets flexing their wings. They have included translation, mostly from Chinese to English or vice versa – Kit Kelen is an emeritus professor at Macao University, and Flying Islands has partnered with Macao-based community publisher ASM (the Association of Stories in Macao). They have had a wonderful variety of style, form, tone and subject matter. All of that is represented in 100 Poets.

This book, pocket-sized like the rest, is the hundredth in the series. Each of 100 poets previously published in the series has a single page – a couple of them fit two short poems onto their page, but none take more than a page. Not every notable Australian poet is represented here – there’s no David Malouf, Eileen Chong or John Kinsella, for instance, and not very much from the world of Spoken Word – but it’s hard to imagine a better introduction to the basic ecology of contemporary Australian poetry.

I was going to list the poets from the book who have appeared in this blog. It’s a long list, and not all of them are there because I read their Flying Islands publications. But it would just be a list of names with links. Instead, here is my favourite title, from Tricia Dearborn:

Perimenopause as a pitched battle between the iron supplements and the flooding

And, in keeping with the blog’s tradition, here’s the poem that appears on page 78, ‘The Sleepover’ by Gillian Swain, whose Flying Islands book is My Skin Its Own Sky (2019):

The first nine lines evoke a pleasant childhood memory. Even if, like me, you never slept over at a friend’s place when you were young, the details – the barbies, the giggling friends brushing their teeth together, the child bodies in adult-sized sleeping bags, the model aeroplanes on the friend’s ceiling – capture brilliantly thrilling combination of intimacy and strangeness that is a sleepover.

Lines 10 and 11 form a finely judged transition from that memory to the very different current situation. They move from the past to the present tense, and the child’s perspective carries over to the different reality – the bed that moves up and down already suggests a hospital, but is presented as a novelty:

like the way your bed moves up and down like 
all the colours the flowers bring

And line 12 lands us firmly in the grim present.

to this grey room.

The person addressed in the first lines is now in a hospital bed.

The interplay of benign memory and grim present continues in the rest of the poem: the three friends once again enjoying each other’s presence long into the night. There is giggling again, and stories. The friendship is as alive as ever, but one of the three friends is dying.

The final lines hold this complex emotional reality in a neat paradox. The imminent death of a friend is not trivialised – but nor is the joy of friendship.

the wrong reasons and  tonight 
your deathbed 
is joyous.

The person I have known longest apart from my two sisters died early this year. Our childhood friendhsip wasn’t of the giggling, sleepover variety, but the last time I saw him we did pay more attention to what we enjoyed with and about each other than to what we all knew was coming. The poem resonates strongly for me.

Multiply that by 100 – or to be honest by maybe 75, because not every poem in the book sings to me – and you have quite an experience. I look forward to Flying Islands’ Second 100.

I finished this blog post on the land of Wandandian of the Yuin Nation, whose beaches are said to have the whitest sand on the planet. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Tug Dumbly’s Tadpoems

Posted on 20 Nov 2025 | Leave a comment

Tug Dumbly, Tadpoems: 400 Shorts (Flying Island Books 2024)

Most poetry books are at least a little intimidating to most people. Tadpoems is not one of them.

In an introductory note, Tug Dumbly (offstage name Geoff Forrester) calls the poems ‘little squibs’ and explains that many of them were born on walks, his mind ‘conversing with whatever it passes at the moment … or maybe just playing with words’. Most of them first appeared on Facebook. ‘A few,’ the note continues, ‘are shameless life-support systems for dad jokes’. It’s rare for a book of poetry to include such a clear and unassuming account of itself.

In addition to the 400 tiny poems, there are more than 40 photos, many of water scenes around Sydney, and close-ups of insects, birds and plants. The book is not only accessible fun, it’s also gorgeous.

It’s a book to be dipped into, enjoyed a moment at a time.

Many of the poems nudge the dad joke genre towards something satirical of even at times profound. One of my favourites:

After too much talk in the cultural hub
it's good to wing home over a bay
of beautiful banality.

I like this too:

Recycle.
Be re-astounded
by the same dear things.

Page 78* is a striking photo of a dead seagull among fallen jacaranda blossoms – a very Sydney image, and not at all typical of the abundant life in most of the book’s images. There are four ‘tadpoems’ opposite:

The poems include a throwaway, bitter criticism of the commodification of everything, ending with a mildly erudite reference to Arthur Sullivan’s song ‘The Lost Chord’:

Plus they found the Lost Chord.
(You can't play it. It's owned by Sony.)

There’s a not-quite-successful joke about changeable weather, and a pun on lit crit terminology. I wouldn’t mind seeing the movie Narrative Ark

And a bit of wordplay that is exactly the kind of thing you can imagine happening in a wordy person’s mind as they go walking:

Went shopping 
when chopping 
wench hopping
in the shopping centre.
Unexpected item 
in the brain area.

It’s silly and makes no claims for itself, but something sticks. The last two lines could refer back to the first three. A paraphrase would be, ‘That discovery of homophones that just popped into my head is unexpected.’ A humourless discussion of the poem might use terms like metapoetic or recursive. One nerdy person might see a reference to shopping malls as pickup locales (I just googled “shopping mall pickup” and sure enough it’s a porn trope). Another might see the poem as enacting an important non-linear mode of mental activity. I think they’d be right, but I’d be too busy moving on to the next ‘squib’ to join the conversation.

It’s a friendly, unpretentious book. Reading it is a bit like going for a walk with someone who points out interesting things in the environment, and who shares his thought bubbles. He’s good company.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Brian Purcell’s Filmworks

Posted on 18 Nov 2025 | 3 comments

Brian Purcell, Filmworks (Flying Islands 2025)

Brian Purcell is a painter as well as a poet. He was lyricist and singer with the rock band Distant Locust, which gets a consistent rating of four stars (out of five) on rateyourmusic.com. He’s been involved in community literature for decades – in 2010 he founded the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival, which celebrated ’15 years of storytelling magic’ in June this year.

Filmworks is a collection of 41 poems, all but one of them named with film titles. The exception, ‘Reason’, has the subtitle ‘Man Ray’s films of the 1920s’, so it’s barely an exception at all.

Here’s a random selection of opening lines to give you an idea of the range of movies that make the cut and the range of poetic responses to them.

An autobiographic note in the first poem in the book, ‘2001’:

A small boy beneath a big screen
that begins to split, somersault, explode
at the beginning of an infinite journey.

Notice the lower case ‘depression’ in ‘Top Hat’, so that it can signify both the context of the movie’s creation and a mental state that it may help with:

A parallel universe
where depression does not exist

High level showbiz gossip in ‘The Misfits’:

Her husband wrote the part for her
as a farewell gift.

Details of the movie are evoked vividly in ‘Blue Velvet’, though this is not how I remember the film beginning, probably another example of my unreliable memory:

The crushed blue velvet gently moving
at the beginning of the film
hangs down like an enchanted sea
or a field where fabulous creatures roam.

In ‘The Imitation Game’ – dedicated, of course, to Alan Turing – the film is a springboard for a poem on our attention economy:

Secrets
we all have them
and they kill us.

I love this book. It feels like an extended conversation with another film lover, a conversation that can go anywhere, and does. And not a Marvel Universe blockbuster in sight. It makes me want to do a similar collection of poems about my own favourite movies.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation . I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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David Adès’ Heart’s Lush Gardens

Posted on 14 Nov 2025 | Leave a comment

David Adès, The Heart’s Lush Gardens (Flying Island Books 2024)

Apart from being a poet, David Adès is a podcaster. On Poets’ Corner, described on YouTube as ‘WestWords’ monthly encounter with celebrated Australian poets’, he has presented more than 50 poets, from Ali Cobby Eckermann to Mark Tredinnick. I could have linked to his conversation with Nathanael O’Reilly when I recently blogged about O’Reilly’s Separation Blues.

The Heart’s Lush Gardens, part of the Pocket Poets Series edited by Christopher (Kit) Kelen, is his fourth book. An introductory note dedicates it to the men in his men’s group, which has been meeting since 1992. ‘These Are the Men’, the title poem of the second of the book’s three sections, echoes that dedication:

Into their hearts' lush gardens
they took me,
gardens of unexpected flowerings
amid bracken and tangles of vines,
gardens where the soil had been laid bare
and seeds planted,
where I am welcome to roam and return.

That so resonates with the joy I remember feeling in my first consciousness-raising group (that’s what we called them in 1976).

This is not the only appearance of the men’s group, and masculine identity and the experience of being a man are broached in many other poems. ‘Slingshot’ imagines David facing Goliath without that weapon; ‘Small Man’ grapples with male entitlement (‘I am a small man in the house of my white skin, the skin of privilege’). The first poem in the book, ‘From Which I Must Always Wake’, is a complex, raw seven pages on heterosexual desire and relationship.

There’s a lot more. I’ll just mention ‘Ripples’, which a note tells us was inspired by a water-damaged original copy of someone’s thesis and poetry manuscript that Adès spotted abandoned on the footpath. The poem’s speaker addresses the writer of the lost work:

This is what you do not know:
who picks up the petal 

you have dropped into the Grand Canyon,
who looks upon it in wonder

as if upon the first petal

My arbitrary practice of looking at page 78* has borne fruit once again. The fine poem ‘Bacha Posh’, which starts on that page, has an interesting take on gender.

According to its Wikipedia entry, bacha posh is a practice in Afghanistan in which, often motivated by poverty, some families will pick a daughter to grow up as a boy. I probably didn’t need to look that up to understand the poem – but it’s good to know that it refers to an actual practice.

I don’t know David Adès, but I’m assuming he’s a cis man, and so likely to be regarded with suspicion if he enters the current public conversation about gender, and in particular trans issues. The practice of bacha posh gives him a way of letting his mind play over aspects of gender, and gender non-conformity, and invite readers to join him. Here, the non-conformity is imposed on the child rather than arising from an inner motivation such as gender incongruence.

This is a terrific example of a poem doing something that would be hard to do in a prose essay. It’s not arguing a case or offering an opinion. You could say it makes music from the language of gender. A handful of words and phrases repeat, almost like chiming bells. I don’t know how well this will work on the screen, but here is a nerdy look at how the gendered words and verbs of being and becoming occur in the poem.

I am daughter
of parents who needed a son, 
who needed someone to go out 
into the world, to work 
and support, to be a man.

I was a girl who dressed as a boy,
who learned the freedom of a boy, 
to be outside, unconfined, 
to be able to play under the sky.

I became a woman, 
blood between my legs, 
breasts I tried to hide,
but I could not become a woman, 
confined indoors to a woman's life.

I became a woman
with the strength of a man 
and the heart of a woman, 
with a man's thoughts and dreams, 
with a woman's courage.

I am a woman
who is more than a woman 
and less than a woman,
a woman who dresses as a man 
but  is less than a man.

I am a woman
who does not avert her gaze, 
who lives in the world outside, 
without children or husband, 
without the life of a a woman.

I am my father's son, 
a woman called Uncle,
a woman who goes where women cannot go, 
who does what women cannot do.

Out of necessity,
I became more and I became less, 
I became half and half, outcast 
yet respected, choosing one life 
so as not to live another.

I didn’t notice until I did that exercise that the final stanza no longer has any gendered words, an eloquent absence. In addition, it repeats the phrase ‘I became’, the phrase of transition, three times. And, in contrast to the first stanza where the poem’s speaker has no agency (‘I am daughter / of parents who needed a son’), here he/she is engaged in a dynamic continuous act of choosing.

Having done that little erasure experiment, I now see that there are other bells in this chime. Active verbs are scattered throughout, appearing more densely towards the end (‘goes’, ‘go’, does’, ‘do’, ‘live’); and the prepositions ‘with’ and ‘without’ have a sort of call and response between stanzas 4 and 6.

Apologies for the nerdiness of this, but if you’ve got this far I hope you’ve enjoyed looking with me. I hope it, and the poem, make a small contribution to Trans Awareness Week, 13–19 November.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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