Budgies and shortlisting
October 1, 2024
Budgerigar
Ten million green commas punctuate blue sky,
quick breaths of swooping wonder, multiplied.
Water-hole is your target; liquid rope pulls you down
and the whole emerald sky is falling, diving,
as miniature bodies scoop into pool.
Your individual markings have taken you
further than native flight; outside the Louvre
I saw you, cold, trying to break in, as pointillist
as Pissarro but acrylic in your finish.
A proud but damp escapee from French balcony,
regretting the lost seed and the found liberty.
So plump and fresh, I have heard you were good eating,
a winging fast food charred to a turn;
as far from stringy battery chook as fingers in the fire.
Most know you singly; whistling in cages,
bowing and bobbing, rattling plastic mirrors.
Driven mad you ring and ring chink-chinky bells
or make love to that hard, hard-to-get reflection.
What joy to see you
just once, as you swoop,
one stitch amongst the tapestry,
a blade of grass in feathered turf carpet, magically landing,
transforming dreary waterside with that fallen sward of Eire.
Swift dragon of twenty million wings,
fluorescing with your simple, beak-filled joys.
PS Cottier
I have just returned from Boulia, in Queensland, about 300 km from Mount Isa, where I finally saw budgies in the wild. These have been my main target bird for ages, but they’ve always avoided me. We also saw wild cockatiels, which was wonderful.
***
In less ornithological news, I have two works shortlisted in separate national competitions. Firstly, my book Tuesday’s Child is Full (In Case of Emergency Press) is shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers (NSW) Book Awards for Poetry. This one is announced at a ceremony Sydney in late November.
Secondly, The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella manuscript co-written with NG Hartland, has been shortlisted for the 20/40 prize, run by publishers Finlay Lloyd. The main prize for this one is publication, so it will be a very exciting announcement later this month.
Review: Peter Doherty on the virus
August 29, 2021
I thought that some readers might be interested in a review I wrote of Peter Doherty’s book An Insider’s Plague Year. And just in case I am right, here’s the link! The following illustration has nothing to do with the review, except that mice feature there, too. I just had to use this, so why not now?
My reviewing is picking up a lot after I made my first swag of selections for poetry at The Canberra Times, which took a great deal of thought. The straight ‘no’ is easy, as are the obvious yes poems. It’s the maybes that kill you.
Pulped Fiction
February 25, 2021
Just received my contributor’s copies of Pulped Fiction: An Anthology of Microlit edited by Cassandra Atherton. Spineless Wonders is the publisher.
It’s a real challenge to write to a strict word count. I wrote a 200 word piece about strange worms that morph into stranger butterflies, called ‘Tudes’. All of the pieces are playing with genre in some way.
March is going to be really busy; launches, readings and a huge pile of books to review. I also hope to be writing for this blog more frequently.
Tuesday poem and story
March 31, 2020
Both via link this time. One is to the Microflix festival, where my story ‘Makeover’ is one of the selected texts that someone may decide to make a film from: http://microflixfestival.com.au/2020/03/11/makeover-by-ps-cottier/ .
The other is to Not Very Quiet, where my poem ‘…scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, or illuminations’ can be read. This one is about people standing (or sitting) at the side of history. https://not-very-quiet.com/2020/03/30/scribbles/ A recording of it may be posted too. Recordings are there in lieu of a launch, which was originally scheduled for last night, pre-virus.
Prose. And more prose.
May 14, 2015
I just had a blog post put up at Overland. It was originally called Literary Competitions: Better than the pokies? and is now called An accountant of dreams, which is a phrase from the essay. A few most carefully crafted jokes have disappeared, but it’s still worth a read! Here’s the link:
The essay relates to this blog in that I’m always giving links to competitions, and it occurred to me that if you entered them all, you’d be spending quite a lot.
At the same time (even on the same day; my cunning plan to invade all corners of the web and print universes at once is coming to fruition like a Napoleonic pineapple mounted on a white pony crossing the Brindabellas*) I have an essay about how I manage to write poetry published in ACTWrite, the magazine of the ACT Writers Centre. I can’t link to that one, but there are 22 points in the article. Twenty-two! That’s quite a few.
Here is my exhausted pen, sweating ink. God knows why as I wrote both pieces on this computer, but a photo is Always Nice.
*Canberra’s hills (or mountains, as some call them). Also, I should shoot that sentence, as it is going off like Cujo after the bat.
PS Cottier 