Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
Level 1, 221 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
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Copyright © Sarah Holland-Batt and Black Inc. 2016
Sarah Holland-Batt asserts her moral rights in the collection.
Individual poems © retained by the authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
ISBN: 9781863958875 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781925435351 (ebook)
Cover design by Peter Long
Typesetting by Tristan Main
Contents
Sarah Holland-Batt
Introduction
* * *
Martin Harrison
Patio
Robert Adamson
Black Winged Stilts
Adam Aitken
In The Billy Sing Baghdad Bar-and-Grill
Jordie Albiston
Chris Andrews
Advanced Souvlaki
Evelyn Araluen
Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal
Judith Beveridge
A Panegyric for Toads
Ken Bolton
Dark Heart
Peter Boyle
Discovered in a rock pool
Michael Brennan
There and Then
Lisa Brockwell
Waiting on Imran Khan
David Brooks
The Pig
Kevin Brophy
Siren
Lachlan Brown
Suspended Belief
Pam Brown
Rooibos
Joanne Burns
bound
Michelle Cahill
Car Lover
Elizabeth Campbell
Cloaca Maxima
Bonny Cassidy
Axe derby
Julie Chevalier
Plan B
Eileen Chong
Magnolia
Aidan Coleman
Secondary
Stuart Cooke
Hinterland
MTC Cronin
ABOVE US
Nathan Curnow
Swimming (my lane)
Luke Davies
Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield
Sarah Day
Wooden Horse
Joel Deane
Following the many elbows of the Yarra
Jelena Dinic
The Silence of Siskins
Dan Disney
untitled: villaknelle xvi
Lucy Dougan
Right Through Me
Laurie Duggan
A northern winter
Ali Cobby Eckermann
Black Deaths in Custody
Stephen Edgar
Hearts and Minds
Anne Elvey
working from home – to do list
Michael Farrell
Death of a Year
Liam Ferney
Requiem
Toby Fitch
Janus
Lionel G. Fogarty
Ambition Man
Tina Giannoukos
XXXI
Lisa Gorton
from Empirical
Robert Gray
The Latter Days
Phillip Hall
Royalty
Natalie Harkin
Cultural Precinct
Dennis Haskell
Tinnitus
Dominique Hecq
Archive Fever
Paul Hetherington
Black Dress
Fiona Hile
Relocation of the Big Prawn
LK Holt
Modern Woman Sonnets
Andy Jackson
The change room
Lisa Jacobson
The Jews of Hamburg Speak Out
Clive James
Plot Points
Virginia Jealous
First contact, Kakadu
A. Frances Johnson
Diary of an Anti-elegist
Jill Jones
In Flight Entertainment
Kit Kelen
takk for alt
Cate Kennedy
Limbo
John Kinsella
Spatial Realignment of Jam Tree Gully
Andy Kissane
Getting away with it
Shari Kocher
Foxstruck
Simeon Kronenberg
Bringing It All Back Home
Verity Laughton
Kangarilla, Summer, 2016
Anthony Lawrence
Wax Cathedral
Bronwyn Lea
Blow Job (kama sutra)
Emma Lew
Poem
Kate Lilley
Lovestore
Debbie Lim
A House in Switzerland
Kate Llewellyn
Possibly
Cameron Lowe
Pastoral / ‘Asset management’
Jennifer Maiden
Orchards
Caitlin Maling
Intimacy
David Malouf
Visitation on Myrtle Street
David McCooey
Invisible Cities
Kate Middleton
Study of a Lion
Peter Minter
Craft
Les Murray
Nuclear Family Bees
π.o.
Shakespeare & the State Library
Ella O’Keefe
Letter from the swimming pool
Meredi Ortega
Cyborg me
Geoff Page
Ekphrasis
Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella
from Hawes — God’s Intruder
Felicity Plunkett
‘A Decidedly Pathological Process:
Claire Potter
Weeping Foxes
Hessom Razavi
Shabnam Nightwish
Peter Rose
The Subject of Feeling
Robyn Rowland
Night Watch
Gig Ryan
Astronomical Twilight
Tracy Ryan
Smartraveller
Omar Sakr
ghosting the ghetto
Jaya Savige
Hossegor
Thomas Shapcott
The body
Alex Skovron
Around the World
Maria Takolander
Argument
Tim Thorne
Jakhan Pollyeva
John Tranter
Young Folly
Ellen Van Neerven
Invisible Spears
Ann Vickery
An Object exists only as it might exist to Another
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Altogether Elsewhere
Simon West
A Plein-Air Artist Reflects on Timing
Petra White
On This
Jessica L. Wilkinson
FAUNE et JEUX
Fiona Wright
Poppies, Katoomba
Ouyang Yu
Self Publishing
Fay Zwicky
Boat Song
Billy Marshall Stoneking
One Last Poem
Publication Details
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
‘I SEE THE POET AS A SEISMOGRAPH OF THE AGE’S DARKER regions,’ Fay Zwicky wrote in a
recently published extract of her journals.* ‘Living out fifty years of this dreadful century has certainly made the needle twitch without stopping.’ I have turned Zwicky’s enigmatic, quaking metaphor of the seismograph over in my mind since I read it; in it, I recognise two ideas. The first is that while the poet does not leap at every cataclysmic event or operate as some kind of geopolitical tuning fork, she often responds powerfully to the dark events and anxieties of the age. Poetry is not written in a vacuum: it is of its time, and it responds to the conditions of its time – whether earnestly or satirically, directly or aslant. And, like a seismograph, the poet often registers the uneasy vibrations of a culture before the repercussions are felt by the body politic – a dangerous prescience that goes some way toward explaining why poets are persecuted by authoritarian regimes the world over.
But Zwicky’s metaphor also speaks more broadly to poetry’s curious relationship to time. As a form, poetry is paradoxically both fleeting and ephemeral, yet remarkably durable. It is able to respond nimbly to its subject matter, at lightning speed – yet last, at its best, for millennia afterwards. It inhabits the language of the hour, and often of the minute; we see this in its swift and often parodic adoption of neologisms, its linguistic dexterity and adaptability, its unceasing and energetic reinvention – yet its readers enjoy decoding it centuries later. The poet, like the seismograph, skitters over the peaks and troughs of a lifetime, but the poem itself is a series of aftershocks realised through generations of readers who follow.
This durability is precisely because the poem detonates in the instant of its reading. Its utterances come into being just as we vault each enjambment; its silences and spaces are conjured up in the moment we encounter them; its meaning is arrived upon through the jouissance and play of reading. Above all, poetry – for both its readers and its writers – is a form that demands attentiveness and active intelligence. It treats language as a volatile and charged commodity, and one whose subtleties and nuances are worth puzzling over. As Valéry defined it, poetry is ‘a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language’. In the context of our increasingly corrosive political discourse and the fuzzy ‘truthiness’ that pervades it, poetry seems to me a radical form, and reading it a radical act.
Reading the past year’s poetry with a view to editing this anthology was a different species of reading than I am used to – full of the usual exhilarating jolts of delight and surprise, but accompanied by an unusual anxiety. I found myself charmed and elated by some poems one day, but then a little cool on them the next; they looked different in one light than they did in another. I wanted to be sure of the poems, but found myself returning to a favourite Michael Dransfield poem more than once, with renewed understanding:
i’m not dead
sure of the poems
life seems
to suffer a bit
in the translation
Like Dransfield, I was ‘not dead / sure of the poems’. I circled back, re-reading and re-reading, feeling like a forensic scientist must: on the hunt for proof, for certainty. I reminded myself that reading poetry – and the joy of a particular poem – is a sort of alchemy; at the risk of sounding mystical, there are aspects to the reading experience that seem mercurial, quixotic, dependent on some unpredictable internal weather. Some days, the poem’s electric power, its frisson, can ‘suffer a bit / in the translation’.
So I re-read, patiently – obsessively is probably the more accurate adverb – and slowly a magnetic group of poems emerged that I found myself returning to, over and over again. Their shocks, to paraphrase a line from a superb Lucy Dougan poem included in this selection, went right through me. I turned them to the light many times, probing their facets; they emerged from this process adamantine. Lines from each of them are now lodged permanently in my mind, and I am as sure of these poems as I am of anything.
I aimed to capture a diverse cross section of the poetry being written in Australia at present and to include the work of new poets wherever I could, but above all I paid attention to the individual poems themselves, privileging those that seemed most urgent, startling, stylish, ingenious, defiant, alive. My selection gestures towards the formal and thematic variety and brilliant inventiveness of our poets, but is a beginning rather than an end point in that respect. Overall, I was struck by the sheer volume of extraordinary poems being published in Australia, the dynamism and range of our poets. I was also struck by the dedication of our poetry editors and anthologists. If, as Dransfield once wrote, ‘to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment’, then the work of poetry editors and publishers verges on zealotry of the best sort.
There are several projects and anthologies that stood out over my past year of reading that are worth remarking on; I hope readers of this anthology will seek them out. Australian Book Review introduced a new initiative with States of Poetry – a significant new annual anthology drawing attention to the geographic distribution and localities of our poets. Dan Disney and Kit Kelen co-edited Writing to the Wire, a remarkable and urgent anthology centred on refugee and asylum seeker issues. Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson co-edited the recently published Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry – a fantastically rich and diverse collection that introduced me to several emerging poets I have included here. And Kate Fagan and Ann Vickery co-edited the excellent Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry, a significant anthology collecting poets committed to decolonisation, ecopoetics, cultural unsettlement, and other forms of transformational poetics.
One of the great pleasures of Australian poetry is its quality of sprawl, to borrow Les Murray’s phrase. The poems collected here sprawl geographically – from the ‘pimple amongst the wildflowers’ of the colonial township at Mullewa in Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s eclogue with John Kinsella, to the catfish hole at Jayipa in Phillip Hall’s ‘Royalty’ and the crustacean effigy at Ballina in Fiona Hile’s ‘Relocation of the Big Prawn’. In a country where even the names of so many of our literary journals signal towards geographical orientation or locality – Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, Island, Westerly – it is perhaps unsurprising that many of these poems contend with place. But their sprawl extends beyond national borders, and is wholly cosmopolitan, veering to the glacial tip of South America in Maria Takolander’s ‘Argument’, a Norwegian graveyard in Kit Kelen’s ‘takk for alt,’ a Guangzhou wet market in Lachlan Brown’s ‘Suspended Belief’, Biscayan and Tahitian surf breaks in Jaya Savige’s ‘Hossegor’, and Rome’s ancient sewerage system in Elizabeth Campbell’s ‘Cloaca Maxima’. The worldliness and urbanity of these peripatetic poems will surely strike readers as a refreshing palate cleanser from the parochialism, tribalism and nativism dominating much of our political discourse at present.
Beyond their terrestrial ambulations, the poems in this year’s anthology also sprawl across a dazzlingly diverse range of subjects and aesthetics. There are poems that tremor with the anxieties of the war on terror, with the seismic shifts of Brexit and the promise of Grexit, poems that reverberate with social and cultural discontent and unsettlement. There are poems that probe news events frequently shrouded by cultural amnesia – from Ali Cobby Eckermann’s indelible ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ to Michelle Cahill’s ‘Car Lover’, a haunting address to those who assault and murder women. There are poems centred on the body – its precariousness, its sensuality, its limitations and mortality – and poems about the often disturbing advances in biotechnology. There are poems sketching the relationship between the human and natural worlds that fizz with a particularly muscular Australian vernacular – Les Murray’s native bees as evicted smallholders ‘with their new life to rebuild, / new eggs, new sugarbag, // gold skinfulls of water’, or Judith Beveridge’s corpulent toads ‘bull[ing] their way across earth’. There are poems interrogating the nexus between language, place, and belonging, stretching from those charting migrant experiences in our capital cities, such as Omar Sakr’s ‘ghosting the ghetto’ a
nd π.o.’s ‘Shakespeare & the State Library’, to the memorable ‘Learning Buandjalung on Tharawal’ by Evelyn Araluen – a powerful account of the continuous cultural knowledge embedded in language and Country.
One of the most likeable aspects of contemporary Australian poetry is that it is profane as often as it is sacred; there is a rich vein of irony and satire that runs through our poetics, a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere. This enduring quality is evident in many of the poems collected here, including brilliant contributions by Pam Brown, John Tranter, Ken Bolton, Ouyang Yu, Jill Jones and Tim Thorne. There are poems that respond ekphrastically to other art forms, from Jessica L. Wilkinson’s ‘FAUNE et JEUX’ to Bronwyn Lea’s playful encounter with the kitsch porn aesthetics of pop art superstar Jeff Koons, and those that speak to the act of writing itself, such as Robert Adamson’s intertextual ‘Black Winged Stilts’, with its Stevensian ‘mangrove tree at the end of the mind’, or Andy Kissane’s sardonic take on recent plagiarism scandals in ‘Getting away with it’. Overall, I suspect my selection skews slightly darker in tone than some previous years; this perhaps speaks to the fact that the past year has felt a particularly vertiginous one. These poems speak in and of unsettling times; in the maelstrom, they shudder and catch.
The Best Australian Poems 2016 Page 1