The Best Australian Poems 2016
Page 12
to gaze back at you. One woman’s fantasy
is another’s solipsism.
The melancholia of not being loved,
firstly in the age of Aquarius and then again
in the age of the Anthropocene.
Or the melancholia of window dressing
the incision between innocence and experience.
Ann Vickery
Altogether Elsewhere
(Auden’s hundred-plus)
Your first words that I read were “Look, stranger,”
which really stuck.
You hymned environmental danger
and illness welling up from bottled anger
in the out-of-luck.
Stranger than any of us was your
thanatology:
mental mapping was a chart of war
but lust for a diagonal metaphor
fed your geology.
Ominous uniforms and the sexy furs
you parsed as threat
like acid rain in silted aquifers
the Romans left. From gaunt commissioners
an each-way bet
gave your calciferous frontier the chance
either of Left or Right.
You didn’t much approve of France,
for their symbolist poetic dance
was a downright
draught of colourless Coca-Cola,
not for grown-ups,
a canker in the thinker’s molar.
You could have liked Savonarola,
but in his cups.
You’d have known the date of each bubonic
outbreak, or heresy;
you knew that most blokes are moronic
and your blow-job poem was merely platonic –
well, ostensibly.
Ambiguous Europe has its weather still:
expert in exile
you turned the twilight into chlorophyll
soodling along beside the sacred rill
mile after lucky mile.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
A Plein-Air Artist Reflects on Timing
It was a cool summer afternoon.
White-plumed honeyeaters worked quickly,
gathering insects from the leaves of a gum.
A plane swept low in laps for a parade.
I noticed how the fences of my garden
stood by idly. I thought, someday if I
could watch this scene afresh, caught on film –
a given light, the given earth, and me,
here, but held by time at one remove –
then all reserve would vanish.
I would grasp each detail keenly.
Alas my thoughts turned to a nerve in my back,
to the undue fame of my enemies, and to my future
glory – majestic as the ocean
meeting the shore. I have recorded nothing.
Simon West
On This
Coming at you like a wave its wide scoop full of surfers
the threat of marriage. The wedding band
will encircle you softly as the sea
laps all around an island.
You won’t even want to swim to the headland.
All the world and all its work cry to you
this is the thing,
and once you have pegged down a gentleman
who might otherwise billow like a kite
in the endless green
lubbery sky of himself
once you have got him and he has got you.
Sapphires glancing in the foam.
Suitors surge in on tall ships.
Penelope weaves and unweaves for the one
above all others.
How he flowers in the mind like a wild transparent violet
held to sunlit glass.
Petra White
FAUNE et JEUX
I thought that gold was harder than paper,
but paper turned out to be harder
– Vaslav Nijinsky
Prelude
A wicked ball, a fluent veil—
dance itself the object of desire
not the one who wields or wears.
So many eyes—it is the war
and time is out of joint
with ink— everywhere
the notebook keeps on sliding;
all shapes and beauty fluid
as the fountain pen unleashed.
This door is never locked
though people are afraid to say:
I do not understand—but feel.
I. L’Après midi d’un faune
My madness is my love towards mankind
– Vaslav Nijinsky
Mischievous sanctuary—withdrawn
into the score alive!
another crime:
the faun is me—
it’s all in the choreography
grinding the pastoral air
two flattened hooves in profile
blades
This is my body: piebald on a mound
quietly, grapes
one bunch
two is all you do—
delight in slow time tease
a fire in the narrow green
of Bakst’s impression—
need for nothing else.
*
A distraction: nymphets on the incline
fleet-footed arms wide open
crossing flat space like so many lines of poetry
three
two
one rouged by the stream imaginary
The faun is I—control
oh head thrown back
the teeth bared hideous
the ears pricked
your lost children, easily spooked by the eye in my forehead.
I know the true beast
Ah! Ah! is not horror but joy
They think I am funny
unhook my arm and run!
The goat in me will eat the veil lick it
push it to the mound
grinding
Know this:
my instrument though roundly hissed
will whistle life into the vase
as an outpouring of encore flowers
II. Jeux
His cruel and barbarous choreography
trampled all over my poor rhythms
like so many weeds
– Claude Debussy
I have a secret to share with you:
a ball thrown astray
in the garden at dusk
is how people come together, even
if we cannot recall
contact fault love
sidelined for a flirt
~ twentieth-century triple kiss;
~ a Zepplin or an aeroplane disaster
~ the tango and the turkey trot
all my ideas, rejected.
I want pointes in the court—
back and forth, a three-way match,
weird trajectories!
Observe the working of my brain
as I butt you in the stomach and then you, too!
It’s a two ball dance and the rhythm is fierce
enough to knock you up
stage
match, set, game:
The crowd turned wild.
Curtain call
Jerky handwriting means kindness of heart.
He is a bad man.
My trunks are packed.
A cure for cancer and a new pen.
I do not reason in the theatre square.
I am a pupil of the round
and round I go—the dance as life
the life as fun and games “mere delusions”
Oh now the blood has rushed to my head and down I fall
easy prey for beasts
in Zurich’s withered garden.
Well: I will stalk your faux propriety—hoof
at your iron closets with my short tail wagging.
I am the faun, and Jeux is incomplete.
Elusive game!—
&nb
sp; I know what earth is
even if the steps are gone.
One giant leap across that stream
could prove the skill in an idea—a dream
of thrusting forward, somehow.
But what kind of leap to court
with the wings, closing in?
(some thought)
silent, san rigueur:
return to the mound
remove the circlet
discard the veil
Ah.
Ah.
Wild joy is in the brown study
where the faun will take his leave
fold inwards
and sleep, peacefully.
Sleep, sleep peacefully.
Jessica L. Wilkinson
Poppies, Katoomba
I didn’t come here to write poems about flowers
but there are poppies of palest purple.
Blown open, each petal
cup-shaped, like an empty hand and
every time I travel my chest winds tight:
what kind of creature
cannot take a holiday? In a hotel bar,
I chance upon an old friend of my father
nibbling on scones, he says that as a child
I’d said I want to be alone
with my own thoughts and this winds me,
although I can’t say why. The poppies
are membranous, the poppies are
precarious, the poppies
are bruise-coloured at their centre.
By the time I get the poppies
to my desk
they are bedraggled,
their hard, green hearts
all they have left to show me.
Fiona Wright
Self Publishing
In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that are never actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publishers include James Joyce Marcel Proust Anais Nin Margaret Atwood William Blake Virginia Woolf D.H. Lawrence Walter Whitman Mark Twain Lord Byron Percy Bysshe Shelley Ouyang and Yu, even Benjamin Britten had to found English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 “partly (though not solely) to perform his own works” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Britten). That’s self publishing. If self publishing is a crime, issue proceedings against us and take us all to an international court where the presiding judge is a well-published and award-winning author who has never self published (Shame on Him!) and will sentence us all to a lifetime imprisonment of self publishers and a deathtime of self publishers
Now listen, to the rain self publishing again as it did 3000 million years ago, on the page that is my roof
Ouyang Yu
Boat Song
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
‘Onward’, the seekers cry;
Speed, you will not, but sink like a stone
Down on the seabed lie.
‘We once had a country’, the desperate cry
‘Now we’re officially dead’.
The Ministers grin, ‘You cannot come in.
You’d consume all our daily bread’.
The debris of massacres, blitzkriegs and bombings,
Putsches and pogroms, war’s goings and comings.
Tyres are for burning and cobbles for throwing,
Army surplus for wearing and weeds fit for mowing.
Lie in military tents with fear gripping breath,
Forget that you’re living, expecting a death.
Remote ideologies send bonnie boats
Like broken-winged birds to our merciful votes.
And we turned them away, yes, we turned them away
As we went out to play
In our dead-hearted country, the bounteous place
Where neighbourly love puts a smile on each face.
As we golf and we gamble, eat, make love and die,
Raise shrines to our roadkill, release a brief sigh—
Only heaven knows why—and for hours upon hours
We bring photos and candles and
Mountains of flowers upon flowers upon
Flowers upon flowers
Fay Zwicky
One Last Poem
I was going to write one last poem
but nothing came out,
only lightning & red sand
& a campfire that speaks
at least fifteen Aboriginal dialects
as it stirs the embers with a stick.
Even a whitefella can understand
two or three sentences
if he’s prepared to press
his ear to the flames.
The Pintupi have forgotten more than
I’ll ever know about the Land –
its ways & names.
Too much to remember,
other than the warning:
don’t eat kuka in the rain.
“Proper cheeky bugger, lightning.”
Today a friend told me,
“everything’s a metaphor for something else.”
But what I don’t understand is:
why, when I wanted to describe you, was
the only metaphor that came to mind
the sound of wind blowing in from the desert?
Billy Marshall Stoneking
Publication Details
*All the poems that do not appear below were previously unpublished
Martin Harrison’s ‘Patio’ appeared in his collection Happiness, (UWAP, July 2015).
Adam Aitken’s ‘In The Billy Sing Baghdad Bar-and-Grill’ appeared in Peril: Asian-Australian Arts and Culture, June 2016 (online).
Jordie Albiston’s ‘’ appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, vol. 6.1, January 2016 (USA).
Chris Andrew’s ‘Advanced Souvlaki’ appeared in Southerly, vol. 75, no. 2, February 2016.
Evelyn Araluen’s ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’ appeared in Overland, vol. 223, Winter 2016.
Ken Bolton’s ‘Dark Heart’ appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.
Peter Boyle’s ‘Discovered in a rock pool’ appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review, 1 November 2015.
Michael Brennan’s ‘There and Then’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.
Lisa Brockwell’s ‘Waiting on Imran Khan’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.
Kevin Brophy’s ‘Siren’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Victorian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Lachlan Brown’s ‘Suspended Belief’ appeared in Underneath: the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2015, edited by Owen Bullock and Niloofar Fanaiyan (Axon Elements, 2015).
Pam Brown’s ‘Rooibos’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).
Michelle Cahill’s ‘Car Lover’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).
Elizabeth Campbell’s ‘Cloaca Maxima’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.
Bonny Cassidy’s ‘Axe derby’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.
Julie Chevalier’s ‘Plan B’ appeared in Meanjin, vo
l. 75, no. 1, Autumn 2016.
Eileen Chong’s ‘Magnolia’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 75, no. 1, Autumn 2016.
Aidan Coleman’s ‘Secondary’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s South Australian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Stuart Cooke’s ‘Hinterland’ appeared in Contra Equus Niveus, vol. 3 (USA, 2016).
MTC Cronin’s ‘ABOVE US’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Queensland States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Nathan Curnow’s ‘Swimming (my lane)’ appeared in PRISM International, vol. 54, no. 1, September 2015.
Luke Davies’ ‘Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.
Sarah Day’s ‘Wooden Horse’ appeared in Underneath: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2015, edited by Owen Bullock and Niloofar Fanaiyan (Axon Elements, 2015).
Joel Deane’s ‘Following the many elbows of the Yarra’ appeared in Australian Book Review, 21 January 2016.
Jelena Dinic’s ‘The Silence of Siskins’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s South Australian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Dan Disney’s ‘Untitled: villaknelle xvi’ appeared in his collection either, Orpheus (UWAP, 2016).
Lucy Dougan’s ‘Right Through Me’ appeared in her collection The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015).
Laurie Duggan’s ‘A northern winter’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.
Stephen Edgar’s ‘Hearts and Minds’ appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, June 2016.
Anne Elvey’s ‘working from home – to do list’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 November 2015.
Michael Farrell’s ‘Death of a Year’ appeared in Plumwood Mountain, vol. 2, no.2, September 2015.
Liam Ferney’s ‘Requiem’ appeared in Island, no. 145, 2016.
Toby Fitch’s ‘Janus’ appeared in Australian Poetry Anthology 2015, edited by Brook Emery and Sarah Holland-Batt (Australian Poetry, 2015).
Lionel G. Fogarty’s ‘Ambition Man’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Queensland States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Tina Giannoukos’ ‘XXXI’ appeared in her collection Bull Days (ASP/Arcadia, 2016).