Poem: The Angel of the North is pissed off
August 4, 2025
Stretching those flat brown wings
it regards the wattle, sings
its songs from Tyne and Wear
wonders how things are up there
and how it came to Canberra
in the wrong hemisphere, a
flight of seventeen thousand k.m.
and whether it’ll wing home again?
away from pesky cockatoos
and a sky too often unmarked blue
with insufficient sludge and rain,
and heat to fry a maquette’s brain.
It spits copper spit from unseen mouth.
Poor Angel! To be transported South.
PS Cottier
A bit of silliness for this week.
A maquette of the Angel of the North stands in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The poem is unseasonal, as it’s very cold in Canberra at the moment, much colder than where the big angel spreads its wings.
Photo by Picnicin. Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication
Poem: Before the Mustang
June 30, 2025
Before the Mustang
It was reliable, comfy as ug boots,
and just about that chic.
Grey, four cylinder, economical,
totally unAmerican.
Not a hint of speed or sprawl.
It was even easy to park,
and slid out of view
before anyone noticed it.
If you wanted to be a spy,
or a private eye, this car
would be the one for you.
You could dwell outside a house
for weeks, before anyone
thought that there was something to see,
something resembling a car.
I loved it, my first new car.
I hated it for its bland compliance
with a view of what should be.
It broke down exactly once,
and the police were hugely surprised.
It had a cavernous boot for shopping,
and no-one raced it from the lights,
making sport from nothing.
It is gone now, but I’m sure
someone is driving it, somewhere,
that grey slab of suburban metal,
that practical lump of sleep.
PS Cottier
Yes, I know that's not a Mustang! But I had to share a photo of this beautiful object spotted at my local shops.
The poem above appeared in the volume V8, written by myself and Sandra Renew, published in 2022 by Ginninderra Press.
Poem: All praise the cut-off gloves
June 29, 2024
In cut-off gloves I can cup
my phone; the oblong light,
and message and swipe
just as I would with only
pale thin gloves of skin.
The poetry anthology,
just arrived from Adelaide,
can be flicked in cut-off gloves.
The flat white slowly sipped,
the essential bling displayed
on cool growths of fingers.
Those crops of pink asparagus,
embedded in the cut-off gloves
sprout towards the glowing words,
etiolated, and punctuated
by the warming medium
in which I plant them.
This very poem can be written
in what it seeks to praise —
woollen, orange, cut-off gloves.
And stuff these Canberra days.
PS Cottier
I know that the image doesn’t really fit the poem, but I like it so much that I had to use it. This is an old poem, from 2016, first published at Project 365 + 1 (Project 366), where I wrote a poem a day for 30 days.
I think fingerless gloves are also called Fagins, after Dickens’s character, but the illustrations I found of Fagin did not sport gloves. Here are the gloves to which the poem is addressed:
Poem: Colour in winter
April 22, 2024
Anyone who wears a black puffer jacket,
so sensible and restrained,
should be choked on their own down
— or that of the now-naked ducks —
and puffed up like a puffer fish, till they fly
away like so many clouds of doom.
Why add to bleakness?
Match yellow with aubergine,
orange and berry crimson.
Clash those hues like cymbals
in the smug faces of constraint.
PS Cottier
Now I could have revived the title of my series of "Nasty little poems" for that, as it's a tad cruel. It's not aimed at those with no choice as to what they wear, but at the sensible middle class. There's something about the temperature dropping in Canberra that makes people dress in black and grey. Way back when I lived in Melbourne I used to wear a lot of black, whereas now I tend towards the citrus and purple. I am reminded of Jenny Joseph's great poem "Warning". Perhaps we need to scream at the sky as we get older, like so many cockatoos. Or at least wear cresty jumpers.
Tuesday poem: How Canberra
May 22, 2023
How Canberra
Parking at the AIS, pink imps called to me, or rather, grey imps wearing pink floppy hats. Gang-gangs opening gates in the sky. Walked to the pool, touching the bronze Guy Boyd woman poised on a plinth, the magic saint of all bad swimmers. Crawled through my twenty laps, more snail-stroke than free-style. Back to the car past groups of kids, past a well-known former athlete, past the memory of Covid marked by a discarded mask. Coffee at Tilley’s and more cockatoos, swinging below powerlines like avian punchlines, yellow fringes tickling the clouds.
PS Cottier
So a little translation for those who don’t live in Canberra; the AIS is the Australian Institute of Sport. Tilley’s is a venerable cafe in Lyneham, a suburb in the inner north of Canberra. And gang-gangs are a type of cockatoo. They are the faunal emblem of the Australian Capital Territory. An absolutely beautiful bird which can be seen quite frequently in Canberra, but which are overall becoming quite rare. Unlike the cocky in the photo.
PS Cottier 