Reviews and sniffer dogs
November 18, 2024
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin has attracted some thoughtful and positive reviews.
Firstly at Compulsive Reader, where Magdalena Ball wrote the first review of the book. She calls it ‘quirky and strangely haunting’. Secondly, at The Australian. This one is behind a paywall, but the reviewer, Jack Marx, uses phrases like ‘so unusually brilliant’ and states that ‘There is not a bad chapter in The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, and a delight of some sort – usually many – on every page.’ It’s enough to make an author blush! Seriously.
In other news, a poem I entered in The Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing was commended, which is great. I am working on a short manuscript about dogs, and the poem was about sniffer dogs. You can read the winners here. And here is my poem. And a dog.
Ardent nose
We sniff our way through violence,
the dropped hat or jeans removed,
splatters on grass, the blood-crumbs,
we call them among ourselves.
Some of us disinter computers containing
hidden quests for poisonous feasts.
Here a soupçon of arsenic, there
a sprinkle of fentanyl, adding spice,
designed to remove a troublesome life.
Recipes rarely handed down.
Others detect stashes of drugs,
or cash converted from same,
secreted behind hasty plaster walls.
Our indications cause such a havoc
of mattocks, a stucco snowstorm.
We are taken outside, in case we eat
those attractive disentombed baggies
neatly counted into incriminating piles,
photographed and fussed over.
We’d rather be out after truffles,
chase sticks and toys, roll in dung,
but we sense delight when we unearth
what your dodgy senses cannot catch.
Your poor excuses for olfaction
are unable to detect screams of scent
slapping the face of the air.
My friend, the springer spaniel,
trained from a floppy ball of pup,
all long hair, tongue and wag,
tastes the cadaver air, helps reveal
the buried answer to a search —
for don’t all dogs love bones?
Long before your Poirots or Bosches,
your Holmes after that fog-bound hound,
we sleuths found what you could not find,
found the worst of humankind.
We barked, or sat, and simply waited
for you to finally catch us up.
PS Cottier
Note: The word sleuth derives from slough dog or sleuth-hound, a bloodhound once found in Scotland.
New book published
October 26, 2024
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin is one of the winning books in the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize. Co-written by NG Hartland and myself, it is a novella. It’s a comedic exploration of identity and politics. The other winning book is Tremor, by Sonya Voumard.
You can read about the book here and buy them if you like. There is an interview at this page with the winning authors. Or come to a launch either in Canberra (Harry Hartog, ANU) or Sydney (Gleebooks). The books are also stocked in a number of independent bookstores.
Tuesday poem: Fingernails
October 15, 2024
Fingernails
They never stop questing outwards, these epiphytic plants,
soilless roots tonguing the air. Mostly, we cut them into stubs,
mere bulbs awaiting final burial, asserting a sharp superiority.
Some men do allow them to snake their ways around and around,
until the hand becomes mere support for their rollercoaster ways.
Gone beyond decoration, the curling roundabout growths all indicate
each life's road and certain end. Some glue fake covers on each finger,
minute bright coffins jewelled with stones like Egyptian scarabs,
that once adorned the dead. But nails need never die. After host stops
they still grow, scraping coffins with cartilage, tusks of ivory feeling
for dirt long denied. Some are fed finally on fire, and burn with sticks
and hair and skin, external teeth closing on the jerking meal of flame.
A few succeed, reach dark earth, and plant themselves, and grow to men,
who carry new nails on clever, thumb-opposed fleshy tools,
deaf to the breathless emergent growth that tips each handy finger.
It crawls out, from the fecund pinkness, unstoppable; the quick tipped
living pointer, small flat shelled snail, that whispers of unseen bones,
and death that never dies, but clasps us tight as skull holds mind.
PS Cottier
Last weekend I was part of a poetry roundtable as Conflux, a science fiction convention here in Canberra, and read this freaky poem which has obvious horror tropes. Delighted to find this illustration by JA Knapp at the wonderful Old Book Illustrations to go with it! I particularly like the mushrooms growing in the distance. I wouldn’t be eating them any time soon…
‘Fingernails’ first published in Chiaroscuro: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words (ChiZine), Canada, Volume 47, Week 2, April-June 2011.
Poem: This is a poem, not a listicle
February 9, 2023
This is a poem, not a listicle. It tastes like leather. If you listen you will soon note that it speaks bad French. It has never been to France. It bought cheap steroids in Bali. It would like to contain the word 'roseate', but can't. It read itself out loud just last week and was well received. It just watched the film The Brain from Planet Arous. It keeps reciting 'After I'm gone, your earth will be free to live out its miserable span of existence, as one of my satellites, and that's how it's going to be...' It can't translate that into French. This is a poem, not a listicle. PS Cottier
A poem dating back to 2015, published here once before, which shows that I was watching too many old science fiction films! I will be posting newer, even new, work here again soon.
But first I have a launch of the book V8 (written by Sandra Renew and one PS Cottier) at Smiths, Alinga Street Civic on Monday 13th, 7pm. Sarah St Vincent Welch will launch the book, and there will also be an open mic before readings from the book. In case you’re wondering, V8 is about cars and other vehicles, and is a poetry collection published by Ginninderra Press.
Tuesday’s Child is Full
October 20, 2022
This is the front cover of my latest book, a collection of poems first published on this very blog. I am particularly delighted with that cover, which relates to one poem inside the book about the Australian White Ibis, or tip turkey.
I have been writing this blog for thirteen years, frequently posting new poems, usually on Tuesdays, hence the book’s name. Thank you to all readers who have followed/commented/read the blog.
The book can be ordered here, from In Case of Emergency Press, which is the best name ever! It is priced at $20 (AUD). Re-reading thirteen years of this blog and selecting the poems was an interesting process, only occasionally bringing on a cringe. Dealing with Howard Firkin, the publisher, was a pleasure.
I will shortly be arranging a launch here in Canberra. Details to follow.
PS Cottier 