Review (your fingers are getting twitchy)
December 20, 2012
Here’s a link to a new review of Triptych Poets Issue Three: http://verityla.com/peaks-from-start-to-finish-blemish-books-triptych-poets-issue-three/ in Verity La, an Australian journal. Tim Jones also reviewed the book previously, on his blog. Way back in November.
Spoiler alert: Mark William Jackson likes it!
Now, it may be just a tad late to stuff it into someone’s stocking in a Christmas related capacity, but why not make your New Year’s Resolution to read more poetry? I intend to read only poetry next year. But that’s just me. I’ll be boring on about that soon. In the meantime, your fingers are moving towards this link. They will press it. You will find that they are delving into your purse or wallet, and extracting your credit card. Somehow, your pesky digits enter your number. And in a while, the book will arrive, with three poets for the price of one. You will kiss your wise fingers, and run out to buy them gloves (should it be cold where you are), or to have a manicure (if, like me, you are a tad vain).
But you will thank your prescient fingers, again and again, as you read the book which Mark William Jackson describes as ‘just straight peaks from start to finish.’
I’m blushing as I paste in that quote, but modesty, they say, is a virtue. So it’s good to parade it.
Christmas. Good. Have.
Tuesday poem: Prayer
December 17, 2012
Prayer
Let me kill the cynicism
that dogs me, toothily.
Let cleverness die
just for today;
let me believe
with simplicity,
that hope was born
that hope is with us
that hope will come again.
Let me lie down in pillowy hay;
no more maybes and yets
and tired, half-hearted smirk.
Or better still, blow me, now, full-sailed
and squalling, billowing onto faith.
P.S. Cottier
May I wish all my readers a Merry Christmas, whatever their faith (or lack of faith).
And, to get away from simple faith and back to weird curiosity, note how two of the wise men in Jacques Daret’s painting seem to be talking into their sleeves, like security guards looking after a VIP.
For the last time this year, click this feather for further poetic gifts. It’ll all be happening again next year, from January 22nd.
Feet, not face
December 14, 2012
Shoes so cool that people say
could I photograph your feet?
Face up to yourself woman,
there’s a party happening downstairs.
Thanks to Sharon who liked the shoes so much!
Tuesday poem: My daughter’s words
December 10, 2012
For Zoe
Snow falling in flumps
down to make a slushy mud
as rolled in by
the dalmination of pigs
marketable, beef-eating and
weeweeweewee,
shown on Playschool,
and repeated forever,
one yawning stretching week,
between half past three and four.
(That giraffe-necked word
animation, she connects
with 101 Dalmatians,
a hang-dog Disney book
dredged together from the film
and read once when she was two.)
All hail the child genius, says Mum,
struck with awe, but not quite dumb.
Here, would you like to see a photo?
Every wallet a portrait gallery,
the child nestled beside the notable.
When she’s eighteen,
she’ll deny that
flumps ever passed her lips,
those cubes of whiteness,
borne from experiment,
flavouring my day.
An only child learns fast,
melts into cultured age
and books, the favoured flavour
of literacy.
Her ecstasy at reading now hints
that flumps’ days are numbered.
Expelliarmus, flumps!
She’ll wave her wand of bigger words,
casting new spells.
Not yet, please, not yet.
Bide a little longer,
stay home from school,
and we’ll be two flumps on the couch
between half past three and four.
PS Cottier
My daughter graduated from primary school last week, so I dug out this poem written when she was just starting school, which was published in my first book, The Glass Violin. Now for a list of cliches:
They grow up so fast
Blink and they’ll be gone
No, that’s not your little baby is it?
All so true, and all so tedious. (Note that I am being tough here; back to the safer realm of the satiric after a very rare leap into family matters.)
The Tuesday Poets are of all sorts. Click this feather and track them like endangered birds:
Busy-ness unbefitting a poet
December 1, 2012
What a lovely present for a launch speech! Yesterday it was about 36 degrees in Canberra and unusually steamy, and I gave my first launch speech for the pamphlet In Response to Magpies. This was organised by Hazel Hall, Australian Poetry’s café poet at Biginelli’s café.
Hazel Hall
It went quite well, and the readings by the poets included in the collection were enjoyable. Here I am looking up in the air, as if there is an invisible magpie swooping:
Fortunately I am wearing my special invisible helmet
I am hoping to write up the speech for publication. The wine remains intact, as it is gin weather.
Last night I went to a poetry slam, co-organised by fellow Triptych poet J.C. Inman at The Front, and it was so steamy and hot we were all like pieces of tofu floating in a laksa. Here is a piece of poetic tofu, also known as J.C. Inman:
J.C. Inman
(my phone was fainting from the heat)
I realised how exhausted I was when I read a poem before the slam and my hands were literally shaking. People must have thought I was a very sensitive flower, but that was not it at all. It was: half heat, half gin, half gym. So what? A mathematican I ain’t.
Canberra: freezing one day and Brisbane the next. If only I could afford a pankawallah. Or another gin.
Now I’m off to be languid. After the gym.
PS Cottier 