The Best Australian Poems 2013
Copyright
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia
email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com
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