The Best Australian Poems 2013 Read online

  Copyright

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Introduction and this collection © Lisa Gorton & Black Inc., 2013. Lisa Gorton asserts her moral rights in the collection. Individual poems © retained by the authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However where an omission has occurred, the publisher will gladly include acknowledgment in any future edition.

  ISBN for eBook edition: 9781922231239

  ISBN for print edition: 9781863956277 (paperback)

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Contents

  Lisa Gorton

  Introduction

  Les Murray

  A Denizen

  Judith Beveridge

  A Dire Season

  Chris Edwards

  A disaster

  Dan Disney

  A quick drink at the bar

  Laurie Duggan

  An Ordinary Evening in Newtown

  Mal McKimmie

  And Then a Cup of Tea

  Ann Vickery

  Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning

  Russell Erwin

  As Flames Were My Only Witness

  Jal Nicholl

  As in the future when

  David Malouf

  At Lerici

  Michael Brennan

  Autoethnographic

  Ella O’Keefe

  Basic Hut Methodology

  Brett Dionysius

  Black Throated Finch

  Justin Clemens

  Blind Spot

  Susan Fealy

  Bringing You Home

  John Kinsella

  Bushfire Approaching

  Maria Takolander

  Chimney

  Kim Cheng Boey

  from Chinatowns

  Peter Bakowski

  City workers during morning rush hour, Collins Street, Melbourne, 2013

  Pam Brown

  Closed on Mondays

  Paul Kane

  Co. Kerry

  David Musgrave

  Coastline

  Mandy Sayer

  Country Chinese Restaurants

  John Tranter

  Crowded Hour and The Consonants

  Will Eaves

  Dandelion

  David McCooey

  Darkness Speaks

  Sarah Day

  Dawn

  Jennifer Maiden

  Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara

  Melinda Bufton

  Did you mean iteration?

  Felicity Plunkett

  Disappearing Act

  Bella Li

  Drowning dream

  Tracy Ryan

  Dual Citizen

  David Brooks

  Dust

  David Malouf

  Earth Hour

  Andy Jackson

  Edith

  Jo Langdon

  Ellipsis

  Kate Middleton

  from Ephemeral Waters

  Paul Hetherington

  Five Abstractions of Blue

  Tim Grey

  Five Deaths

  Bonny Cassidy

  Floored

  Robert Adamson

  Francis Webb at Ball’s Head

  Ken Bolton

  “Hindley Street”—How to be perfect there

  Mark Mahemoff

  Hotel

  Kent MacCarter

  Ich Möchte: A Monument to My One Date with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Granddaughter in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1987

  R. D. Wood

  In the Desert

  Lionel G. Fogarty

  Induct True Legendary Thrills Bravery

  Brenda Saunders

  Inside Edward Hopper

  Jessica L. Wilkinson

  Jivin’ With Bonny Cassidy etc.

  Sarah Holland-Batt

  Last Goodbyes in Havana

  Vivian Smith

  Le Cimetière du Montparnasse

  Clive James

  Leçons de Ténèbres

  Kevin Hart

  Little Book of Mourning

  Jane Gibian

  Loans slip

  Darby Hudson

  Lumière train

  Fiona Wright

  Marrickville

  Chris Andrews

  Mateship

  Andrew Sant

  Mediterranean Time

  Richard Kelly Tipping

  Meeting the Relatives

  Bai Helin

  Meeting with the Same River

  Matt Holden

  Melbourne ode

  Andy Kissane

  My Husband’s Grave

  Shari Kocher

  my singing empty hands

  Carmen Leigh Keates

  Nostalghia

  Michael Farrell

  Not in vain

  Oscar Schwartz

  Nyirbator

  Ali Cobby Eckermann

  Ochre

  Petra White

  Ode on Love

  Adam Aitken

  Old Europe (2)

  Diane Fahey

  On Dreams

  Jaya Savige

  On Not Getting my Spray Can Signed by Mr Brainwash

  Lachlan Brown

  Outstretched Arms

  Louis Armand

  Pictor Ignotus

  Claire Potter

  Plant poem

  Anthony Lawrence

  Poetry of the Taliban

  Claire Gaskin

  pollen wind

  James Stuart

  Postcard for Marilla

  Cassandra Atherton

  P.R.B

  Nathan Curnow

  Prophecy

  Gig Ryan

  Rally

  Aden Rolfe

  Regression to the mean

  Michelle Cahill

  Renovations

  Laura Jan Shore

  Revealed

  Rosanna Licari

  Revisiting Yugoslavia: Rijeka, Croatia

  Cameron Lowe

  Rise and Shine

  Paul Magee

  Rupert in Japan

  Kate Lilley

  Season’s Greetings

  Geoffrey Lehmann

  Self Portrait at 65

  Robyn Rowland

  from Shaping the Dark: Three Readings of Tony Lloyd’s Oil on Linen Painting ‘On a Dark Night You Can See Forever’

  Joanne Burns

  snowy

  A. Frances Johnson

  Soar

  Jennifer Compton

  Sorrowful
>
  Ali Alizadeh

  Spiritual

  L. K. Holt

  from Stages of Balthazar (with a Chorus of Elders)

  Anna Fern

  Strange, unremarkably so

  π.O.

  Street Encounter

  Brendan Ryan

  from Succession

  Nguyen Tien Hoang

  Summer

  Louise Oxley

  The Bat Corridor

  Caitlin Maling

  The break

  Ella Jeffery

  The Brooklyn International Motel

  John Hawke

  The Conscience of Avimael Guzman

  Robert Gray

  The Dark Sisters

  Kit Kelen

  the dead are with us and you read it here

  Corey Wakeling

  The Ear Especially

  Daniel East

  The God of Bone and Antler

  Fiona Hile

  The inevitable beauty of the viewer when faced with the partitionist tactics of the situationist lover

  Judith Rodriguez

  The Life Inside

  Hu Xian

  The orchard

  Thomas Shapcott

  The owl painting

  Peter Minter

  The Roadside Bramble

  Jill Jones

  The Slide

  Alan Wearne

  from The Vanity of Australian Wishes

  Angela Gardner

  The View from GOMA

  Geoff Page

  The ward is new

  Anne Elvey

  To Drag the Saints back from Heaven

  Michelle Leber

  True Listening in the Palace of Treasures

  Peter Rose

  Twenty Questions

  Stephen Edgar

  Under the Radar

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  Up at a Villa

  Toby Fitch

  Valleys

  Ainslee Meredith

  Warning

  Martin Harrison

  Watching How A Rain Front Stops

  Paul Mitchell

  Western landscapes with retreating horizons

  Josephine Rowe

  Whale Heart

  Ivy Alvarez

  What Frances Farmer Ate

  Liam Ferney

  When God Dies

  Gemma White

  When You Showed Me the Stars

  Eugene Dubnov

  Who Took the Bee’s Greed For a Sign

  Christopher Konrad

  Window onto the Bay (after Kafka)

  Debbie Lim

  Women in Classical Chinese Love Poems

  Publication Details

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  In this anthology the poems are set out alphbetically because I have selected poems, not poets. Many of the poets whose work I like best do not have poems in this book, perhaps through an accident of timing or because their poems work not singly but in collections. More, though, the poems are set out alphabetically to bring home the ritual and music of language, always more at play in poetry than in prose.

  The anthology is an abcedarium. Its poems set off through the letters of the alphabet – the first signs, the fixed sounds, so habitual to thought they can seem real, which are invented. In 1894 Mallarmé declared, ‘Speech is no more than a commercial approach to reality.’ One way or another, poetry’s play of language works to restore that relationship between speech and reality – or, at least, between speech and experience.

  An anthology is essentially arbitrary – especially one such as this, composed of individual poems. Beyond the vagaries of selection, even its structure is arbitrary. Open it anywhere and you find yourself at a beginning. If the structure of any book makes a not-to-scale model of time, this anthology offers an experience of time that is now, and now, and now – instants that replace each other. It has no chronology and no main line; a reader can move through it in any direction at will. I hope the experience of reading this anthology will bring into question how far those abstractions – ‘best’, ‘Australian’, ‘2013’ – exist in fact, and what end they serve as one thinks about the poems ­collected here.

  What characterises Australian poetry now is its variousness: a play of forms and registers and voices, not only from poem to poem but within poems, too. Here are collage poems with a confessional impulse, short short stories, late surrealist couplets, poems that weave satire and lyric together, fragmentary essays in epistles, metaphysical pastorals, epic narratives glimpsed through keyhole lyrics, and lyrics that explode the idea of what a lyric can say, and be.

  This variousness – hybridity, flexibility – suggests a new concept of influence, far from the ‘anxiety of influence’ that Harold Bloom defined forty years ago. Though Bloom’s idea of some binary opposition between tradition and the avant-garde persists in some poetry criticism, it hardly helps to understand the free play of influence in Australian poetry now.

  Maybe that sense of free play comes from a different version of poetic tradition, one the Net has made possible: poetic tradition outside institutional control, revealed not as a monolith but as a history of reading, as wayward and curious as reading is. Any Ern Malley, dreamt up now, would have read poetry from around the world and across history, a tradition at once instantaneous and disorderly.

  A poetic tradition, though it might seem authoritative (‘best’, ‘Australian’, ‘2013’), is a chancy and contradictory thing, a clustering web of connections between writers, which, because influence works so oddly, has many nodes and outposts, threads that stretch across borders of nation and language. The Net can serve as an image of this version of tradition, in which one poem opens into another poem, and another, and again. The mind, through the screen, takes possession of prosthetic memory; proliferation and deferral make up its experience of time, and together conceal its many blind spots, limits and distortions. Beyond anxieties about the economics of bookselling and the printed word, this version of tradition seems to me the most intriguing consequence of new technology. Some recent instances of plagiarism are disturbing most of all because they corrupt these experiences of discovery.

  It is no paradox that poetry on the Net – endless, unfolding, indefinite – brings home the importance of local places and printed books, which, exactly because they are singular and confined, can pass into history and become the holding place of memories and arguments. Poetry, whose forms close in time, is a kind of writing that justifies the printed book – an artefact. As commercial interests overrun the Net, the privacy of a printed book shows again its value. Libraries are burying their books too soon.

  It seems to me that poetry, more quickly than prose, has registered these changes: this free play of influence, and the question of what survives, what goes beyond parody. In the several thousand poems that I read for this anthology, I looked for ones that seemed to me surprising, generative, memorable. If the making of a poem is a series of decisions, transactions with possibility, some poems seem to hold like an electric charge the trace of all those forfeited possibilities.

  Various, adaptive, inventive: poetry is everywhere, inventing its own communities, where you can seek it out – in online and paper magazines, newspapers, public readings, performances, reading groups and independent publishing houses. I am grateful to the editors and curators who have allowed Black Inc. to republish poems, and I thank Black Inc. and all the editors who have helped with this anthology, Chris Feik, Kate Goldsworthy, Nikola Lusk and Julian Welch, not only for their calm efficiency but also for their commitment to Australian poetry.

  Lisa Gorton

  A Denizen

 
; Les Murray

  The octopus is dead

  who lived in Wylies Baths

  below the circus balustrade

  and the chocked sea tiles.

  Old legerdemain of eight

  died of too much chlorine

  applied to purify the amenities

  of urine and algal slippage.

  Favourite of chivvying children

  the one who could conform

  its elastics with any current

  or hang from its cupped feet

  now lies, slop biltong

  beak and extinct pasta

  out in the throwaway tide

  and will leave with the wobbegong.

  A Dire Season

  Judith Beveridge