Well, I have now reached the end of the States of Poetry (ACT) mini-anthologies, accompanied by delight and privilege in having been able to showcase something of the poetry where I live, as well as regrets that I couldn’t include a lot more poets. Eighteen out of more than fifty (at a conservative count) published, recognised local practitioners gives a taste, only, of what the ACT has to offer. And since this project began three years ago, established poets have moved into Canberra, new voices have emerged from within the community, new poetry venues have opened up, and a new poetry publisher, Recent Work Press, is not only publishing local poets, but also brokering international relations and collaborations.

Poetry is flourishing in the national capital, in many forms. There is a strong oral poetry culture evident in slam, rap, and spoken word verse events, and an equally strong presence of poems written for the page — lyric verse, prose poetry, and bush poetry. Form poetry, tanka, haiku and prose poetry, new approaches to the sonnet, and material poetics being exhibited in galleries across the Territory: all are testament to the rapid growth of poetry in all its guises, in the ACT.

This year’s poets are a mix of old and familiar voices, and newer entrants to the field. Each has a very distinctive eye, voice, and style; and each is influenced or perhaps inflected by the Canberra landscape – its human and natural environments. In alphabetical order, may I introduce: Paul Collis, Lesley Lebkowicz, Miranda Lello, Paul Munden, Mark O’Connor, and Anita Patel.

Paul Collis, perhaps better known locally for his prose writing, has brought together a body of poems that speak to, and out of, his experience as an Aboriginal man living in twenty-first century Australia. His twin concerns are the telling of stories in poetic form, and the representation of Aboriginal – and especially Barkindji – voices in the contemporary world.

Lesley Lebkowicz is a long-term Canberran, for whom the ACT and its region is an enduring influence. She has written work responding to its politics, its social nuances, and the natural world; but, refusing to be tied down to a single idiom, also writes evocative poetry that expresses other absorbing practices, particularly her meditation and her more recent explorations in pottery.

Miranda Lello comes out of a spoken word poetry background, and has only more recently been turning her attention to the crafting of poems for page as well as stage. Her works combine close observation with a strong sense of wit.

The person most recently associated with the ACT is Paul Munden, who joined the University of Canberra in 2015 and has galvanised poetry on and off campus. A British poet, he brings an inquisitive and generous eye to the local context, and a fresh sense of how the Australian landscape might speak to the humans who live on its surface.

Mark O’Connor was, famously, the poet of the Sydney Olympics, and his work is characterised by a curiosity about contemporary social events and community responses to those events: moving beyond reportage to thoughtful accounts of everyday life.

Anita Patel has lived here for decades, but, like Paul Munden, has something of an outsider’s eye to the place, bringing her cultural heritage and her several languages to bear in crafting poems. She is a member of Canberra’s Mother Tongue – Multilingual Poetry group, who provide opportunities for people to read poems in their own language, reminding audiences of the patterns and flows of human utterances.

All six poets, like the twelve who preceded them in States of Poetry 2016 and 2017, showcase something of the diversity and energy of the region; they look outward, and internationally, as well as looking inward, participating actively as members of a vibrant and energetic community of practice.

A Barkindji man, born by the Darling River in Bourke, far north-west New South Wales, Paul is an emerging writer and poet, who works at the University of Canberra, teaching creative writing. Paul holds a PhD in cultural theory and creative writing. Dancing Home, his first novel, won the national 2016 David Unaipon Award for a previously unpublished Indigenous writer and was published by University of Queensland Press in 2017.

Statement

'Stories and storytellers are, and have always been, in my life. I listened to old people tell me stories when I was a kid growing up in Bourke. Blackfullas are still telling each other and all other people stories all the time I suffer badly being away from my ‘country’. And, Canberra? Strange place, man. But ‘the Can’ is a good place to write. I use to move around town – coffee shops, bars, wherever there’s internet really – and I’d sit by a window with a coffee, beer, or glass of wine, and get into the thoughts around the writing. So, the Can’s been good to me. Love the seasons, colours and anonymity too.

Archie Knight and other blak authors lit a fire in my mind a long time ago about blak representations by blak people. It’s so important to speak up, to write up and to reach out to others in and with your art, no matter what you are – visual artist, performer, hip-hopper, writer – it’s all important, man.'

Paul Collis, extract from profile in Bite, 2 August 2017

Poems

More than just a pin-prick

Cult-charr Jammer

Soon dust

Vapour trails

Whisper

I’d become …
just a public pain.
Did I make you, just a little
… sick?
Make me your vampire, then –
your time.
Take my neck.
Dig deep with kisses.
Let’s feel the swirl of blood.
A country boy on Country is a power difference-making ...
Spirit flying time with eagles – where everything’s clear.
I’ll never be clear.
Not in this life.
Not in any time.
But I can’t keep my eyes from this changing sky.
Can’t stop looking into your blue.
Biaami footprints out there show me the way.
You’re there.
You’re every watchtower.
You left your axe mark in Nyemba stone – on my heart.
You made the name and the sacred water.
Are they your tears, great love?

Back in town:
It’s rainy, cold and wet
so cold tonight …
Colder too, because I’m alone
away from you.
And it’s a lover’s night of holding close.
I love that being smuggled into each other’s neck …
Yet it doesn’t feel like I’m in irons.

Paul Collis

Yo!

Whitefullas got no cult-charr!
– Only me
With my arm fulla tatts, up my sleeve.

– Only Us Mob!
Only us
Got cult-charr.

Don’t tell me! I lived it, man. Us bruvas, we live it –
Everyday man. We fuken live it.
Blak and Proud. Deadly, un’a?

Always was
Always will be
ABORIGINAL LAND.

Colonisation is YOURS whitefulla.

Blak, proud and deadly …
King Billy,
Queenie,
Grandfather,
Grandmother,
Emu in the sky

– they’re MINE, whitefulla!! NOT YOURS!
What you got, whitefulla?
You git lost. You steal. You kill my country.

You poisoned us.
Kill our water.
Try to wipe us mob out, whitefulla.

Emu in the sky watchin’ all this –
Murrdie kids on the ground, watchin’ all this too.
Always was – always will be –

ABORIGINAL LAND!

Red, Black, Yellow.
Only I can know this country!

‘Un’a?’

Paul Collis

(for Satendra)

What happened to me

What did I do to deserve that?

I don’t want to be old person.

I’m buggered now, poor fulla me, done, old, like dust.

I should go to doctor, and ask him a question.

He said, ‘Only thing worse than getting old, is not.’
Wise man, Doctor. He’s like light. His eyes know. They see into me. They see that what I
don’t, that I can’t see.

My hands, all busted now. Used, poor fullas, done a good job, soon they’ll be dust.

My head ... He’s cold now. Not much hair, cold gets in from the top. Can’t make it stop.
Hair, all dust now.

And my eyes, water, turnin’ blue ... No turnin’ back.

Soon. Soon. Soon,

all dust.

Paul Collis

(For my sister, Joanne)

Slowly the days pass.
Buses, cars, bikes
all roll away, away.
She is gone, down a shady street in shiny shoes.
Way above, vapour trails burn the sky
and way below, scars burn the land.
She screams, but I can’t hear.
In another street, the new suits,
suit themselves, and colours burn red and gold.
Noisy bastards. Shut up! Open up! Give her back.

A ghost slides up next to me
I feel her now, can see her vapour trail.
These days, I keep my shoes clean,
Walking down shady streets.

Paul Collis

I wrote ‘Vapour Trails’ after losing my sister, Joanne, in 2016 to cancer. Joanne was a beautiful woman, the best of us, I believe. Her death has brought us incredible sadness. I try to ‘find’ her, to keep her with me, in my imagination. I imagine her here with in my writing, and together we walk down shady streets.

Stories, whispery voice
Mooda-Gutta!
Warning sign, stampede horse.
Mooda-Gutta!
Water spout ... sounds like petrol on fire –
Don’t cross there! Mooda-Gutta
Don’t say it aloud,
Whisper ‘Mooda-Gutta’.

Paul Collis

Lesley Lebkowicz has been publishing poetry since the early 1980s. Her last book, The Petrov Poems (Pitt Street Poetry), won a Canberra Critics’ Circle award, was shortlisted for the 2014 ACT Book of the Year, and won the 2014 ACT Writing and Publishing Award (Poetry). She has also published a collection of short fiction Washing my Mother’s Hair, and a translation of the earliest Buddhist verse cycle, in collaboration with Pali scholars. She has spent many years in silent retreat and founded the Canberra Insight Meditation Group. 2017 saw her first exhibition of ceramics. Another is planned for 2018 as is the publication of her next book Kvetch (Pitt Street Poetry).

Artist statement

'My writing inevitably reflects where I live, especially the bits of Canberra close to home. I like to walk on Black Mountain: it and the lake and the country around the town appear in individual poems. Canberra informed much of The Petrov Poems. It’s a very Canberra story, both leading up to the defections of Volodya and Evdokia Petrov, and during the Royal Commission into Espionage.

Much of my life has been involved in ascetic meditative practice but I don’t seem to be able to write directly about it. I think it informs my creative work, but it’s hard to say how, apart from an occasional reference. It’s in my ceramics as I’m drawn to the Japanese aesthetic which is influenced by Zen Buddhism, but I can’t locate as clearly in my poetry.'

Lesley Lebkowicz

Poems

Moorhen at Black Mountain Peninsula

Making the road

Lichen: 13 points

The pot I imagine

instead

Further Reading

www.lesleylebkowicz.com

Five ducks are standing
on a narrow strip of concrete

designed to ease boats into the water.
They have their backs to me;

even so, at the sound of my steps,
they slide into the lake.

A moorhen rises up and
onto the concrete.

She raises the dark wedge of her tail
and shits a neat soft gleaming pile

then steps towards me
small yellow beak leading the way

like a dainty beacon. I yearn
for things to be so simple:

eat, shit, swim, sleep.
She’s plump and round and her tail

lifts and falls erratically as she walks,
head to one side:

Have you brought food?
Now there is only the moorhen

& the sweet shell of mind and body
watching. The hen dives into the lake and

emerges inside a soft cage of overhanging willows.

Lesley Lebkowicz

The gentle hills north of Taralga
unfold as though

everything were possible. Trees
grow. Their crowns shift in the small wind

showing off new leaf tips: pink, green, a hint
of blue. The cows in the paddocks are big

and brown. They browse and stare
into space. One lays her head on her friend’s

shoulder. Their calves lollop around
getting the hang of things. A bull is fenced

in. He stands still. A curl of hair hangs
from his pizzle. But my blood no longer

flows. My breath is still. No oxygen
is fed into my cells and no waste

removed. It’s true my hands and feet
still drive the car. To the right another road;

the signpost points to Crookwell.
I have never been there

but my mind makes the way:
a road of rutted dirt with tussocks of

grass bunched on either side like skirts
held up against the dust that rises

from each passing car. It takes a bend
into rolling country – roos

raise their heads at the sound of a motor –
and then it winds its way to Crookwell ...

I stop where I am – north of Taralga –
and climb out, dragging my body

as though she and I were one; I lean
on the warm metal and look at the hills

and the trees and the cows and breathe again.

Lesley Lebkowicz

1        They know the subtler shades of green and where each one belongs;
2        and some reds:
          ochre, orange and something aching towards crimson –
          all in a single patch;
3        they grow patiently
          as little as a hair’s breadth a year;
4        and live on bark and stone and brick and soil
          and even on a bus abandoned near Jerramungup;
5        some eat that on which they live,
          working hollows into stone,
          making of diet and habitation one thing,
          a modest economy;
6        they cope with hard things
          and take on the colonising of a quarry;
7        some make minute fronds which can lift from bark into air
          or wrinkle over protrusions;
8        they are sensitive – and have been used
          to measure the pollution that we make;
9        both gentle and harsh terrains are their home,
          rainforests and deserts, and they live according to their means:
          it’s in the Arctic that they grow most slowly;
10      they have humility:
          most live for nothing but rain and air and sunshine.
11      There is, though, no such thing as lichen:
          which is made of algae and fungi in intimate relationship
          and is an image of no-self (anatta), the different elements
          wound together to create the illusion of solidity;
12      and also an image of tolerance:
          the different forms living as one.
13      In this they are a comfort.

Lesley Lebkowicz

‘Lichen: 13 points’ was was placed second in the ACU competition in 2017 and published in the shortlist chapbook.

             (first stanza after Rosemary Dobson’s Over the Frontier)

The pot I imagine
is always better
than the one
                I make.

But after all these years
my hands are learning
how to work clay
against the turning wheel
how to have it climb its own line.

Done now, I set the finely turned
white porcelain beside
a small stack of
shallow dishes thrown
by an Indian village potter.
Light glows through
the white; sinks into
the terracotta and sleeps.

Lesley Lebkowicz

we write small poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –

all this to make sense of
the random moments
parading past our hearts
in chaos. instead

we should write poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –

Lesley Lebkowicz

Miranda Lello is a Canberra poet and performer whose début poetry collection, A Song, The World To Come, was published in March 2017 by Recent Work Press. It took thirty-five years to write, and Miranda launched it on her birthday under a tree outside the National Film and Sound Archive, one of the places she loves most in Canberra. Miranda has performed regularly around Canberra over the past twelve years, including at The Salt Room, Canberra Slambouree, BAD!SLAM!NO!BISCUIT!, and at Smith’s Alternative. In 2011 she was a finalist in the National Poetry Slam. She has been a featured performer at the Noted Festival and has had multiple poems shortlisted for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. She has had poems published in Axon: Creative Explorations, fourW, and the now long-gone Canberra journals Block and Burley.

Statement

'Poetry as form: I have always thought that poetry is broken, and that is what I love about it. In a poem we always fail to capture the thought, the moment, the feeling that we are trying to write, but in the spaces left by that failure the reader connects with the poet, fills the spaces with their feelings. So I try to write in a way that gestures to that failure – halts and stumbles.

Poetry as content: What can we fill a poem with but our lives, and what are our lives but everything? My poetry is rooted in the places I live and visit, most notably Canberra and its suburban landscape, the feeling of not being at the centre of things. My poetry is also shaped around the art I love – poetry and film in particular. But I think poetry must gesture beyond ourselves, and beyond itself and back to the world that creates it. A poem should lead back to life. The everyday life that is so terrible and beautiful, so connected now across the world.'

Miranda Lello

Poems

A trip to the library

Epicurus's Morals

Fake Weather

Kings among men

New Years Day by the river

Road trip

I set out one morning to return a book and five years later I have not returned; face
pressed into the dirty skin of the Earth. In the bushes I stare from scrubby branches skin
angry with red rashes trace paths travelled. I remember two of the things I left behind –
a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and a poem I wrote in Mexico. Tears catch in my eyes
at sunset and I bow my head to the night and howl like a beggared king. My raggedness
defends me from seasons such as these. I come to the ocean and remember a story I
wrote that ended that way. I scoop a handful of sand. My wrist aches. Once you could
see the blue veins along the inside of my elbow, my arm, my wrists, my palms now I am
covered with maps of a lake, a bridge, a stand of bamboo with a house behind, a river
hemmed by walls, a tunnel through blackberry bushes. I stand on wet sand. We are born
screaming to this stage of fools because we know what’s coming; we forget. The ocean
catches my ankles and is all remembering. I do not know the way back but I am home
for a time in the water under the clouds. One day the ocean will dissolve into the sky.
The sky is all forgetting. I set out this morning to return a book and in the evening the
sun drowned itself in the ocean. An unexpected development we are unlikely to witness
again.

Miranda Lello

Contains lines from King Lear.

Adlubescence, n. Pleasure,
delight
           1.    April day in Canberra, fog in the morning
                  lifts, sunshine, moon
                  waxes white and clear in the evening. E21.
           2.   Mutual resistance arising from
                  impenetrability, (Walter Charleton [1620–1707]).
           3.   I can scarcely refrain from kissing you.

Miranda Lello

(after William Shakespeare, Richard III Act 1, Scene 1)

this winter of our discontent
dead leaves scutter on roads
sad! no one is sadder than me

the sun reports winter as
summer – fake news!
winds carry chill of snow

I won some victories
made crowns of branches
bruised arms stripped bare

fool trees ask the sky for care
stupid! sad! grab what you want
when you cannot prove a lover

fake news! you have determined
me a villain in this my winter
I make great again make bright

this weak piping time of
idle pleasures sportive tricks
was made for me for my shadow

night comes early
dogs bark at me as I halt
I am the saddest

like this breathing world
I am half made built from
drunken prophecies, libels and dreams

Miranda Lello

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
Henry Hill, Goodfellas

I am in a Martin Scorsese film – except I’m not
In 1972 I was in a bar with my gangster friends
having my gangster laughs and we were
Kings among men – ‘You’re a funny guy!’
I shouted we shouted guns sleeping restlessly
in pockets on belts in the top drawer by the bed

But then little Marty, who maybe watched
through the windows in Little Italy as a boy
watched as he walked past cafes butcher shops
taxi stands delis where the men in suits gathered
smoking and smelling of meat and money
walking to the dark cinema where he learned to
dream dark dreams, watched us as we were
Kings among men, Marty grew up and
Dreamed us all again onto strips of celluloid

And me I’m forgotten. Forgotten the men
who played in marching bands on Saints days
women who wore their best flowered dresses
in the shops holding the hands of screaming children
eyes drooping mouths hard carrying bags of shopping up
dirty apartment staircases longing for a house
in the suburbs and a man with a nine to five job

You think you see think you know us because
you saw a dream on the screen that looks
somewhat like us – we are gone we who
were kings among men smelt of death
memories of the old country violence of the new
No one remembers us instead remember
Ray Liotta’s beautiful eyes Robert DeNiro dancing
Hervey Keitel kneeling smeared with movie blood

We thought we were building a kingdom but
what we built is effaced – the kings that came after us
wielded the dream the representation and our
fierce words our guns our blood and gold were
no match for little Marty and his celluloid dream

Miranda Lello

I swim through obscure water to the far bank where
trees hunch searching reflections in muddy currents

I crawl beneath greening branches beside dark bracken
spiky cycads stare out at the people on the other side

They lie spread on sparsely grassed sand congregated
by this inland river beneath incongruous beach umbrellas

They stumble through shallows on hidden rocks swim
to the middle where lazy currents turn their eyes to the sky

They will not climb the dirty bank grasp tree roots grab
clinging plants and haul themselves upwards so I am safe

I turn and see the hill behind me burnt out trees silhouetted
against bright sky promising green ranges stretching away

Sky promises trees sprouting new leaves on sunlit hills
next Spring grass will quiver with wildflowers and sun moths

I look at bending trees gripping to the bank gnarled roots
claws in dry dust mud of the river gives back no reflections

I turn from the sunlit hill dive into water where weeds embrace
the muddy bed embrace love me in the sunlight salted dark

Miranda Lello

The world is breaking
driving through the falling dark somewhere bombs are falling
and I want to show you where I came from
point to the purple hills and the darkening trees
the night condensing on the fields
But you are sleeping, or pretending to

The world is breaking
I would like to say that once this
ringed in valley was all the world and cupped me in its hand as
I conversed with blades of grass or
crawled through the blackberries chasing fairies
But you are sleeping, or pretending to

Somewhere a city is burning and we could
at least talk about how easily edifices crumble
how delicate is our human skin
tiny hairs everywhere but the palms of our hands
soles of our feet how easy to dissolve
But you are sleeping, or pretending to

I am driving with all the windows down hearing
yesterday happening on the other side of the world
I hear crying and want to ask if you remember
the time we went naked swimming in the surf at night
how did the hollow booming of the grey waves sound to you
as we stood wet and bare on the sand?

Wake and I will show you where I came from
tell you how the waves sounded like the echo
of all the eons of the earth the beat of my brief heart
tell you if we drive west we can keep
a step ahead of yesterday where I don’t want to alarm you
the world seems to be ending

But you are sleeping, or pretending to

Miranda Lello

Paul Munden has published five collections, most recently The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press, 2017) and Chromatic (UWA Publishing, 2017). He was reader for Stanley Kubrick from 1988–98, and has been Director of the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) since 1994. He has worked as conference poet for the British Council and edited Feeling the Pressure: poetry and science of climate change (British Council, 2008). In 2015 he took up a position as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canberra, where he is also Program Manager for the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), running the annual Poetry on the Move festival. He is Associate Editor of Axon: Creative explorations and the literary journal, Meniscus, and co-editor with Nessa O’Mahony on Metamorphic: 21st century poets respond to Ovid (Recent Work Press, 2017).

Statement

'Having spent much of my life working for a UK organisation supporting other writers, I came to the University of Canberra partly to spend more time on my own writing, and I have found the University – together with the wider ACT poetry community – a wonderfully creative and supportive environment in which to work. Alongside experiments in prose poetry, I have focused increasingly on poetic form, particularly the sonnet (and new variants). I have always been interested in the relationship between writing and music, and a new interest in translation has led me to produce new English versions of the sonnets found in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons score – attributed to the composer himself. My aim is to include these and other poems in a hybrid book ‘interpreting’ the British violinist Nigel Kennedy.'

Paul Munden

Poems

What he overhears

The violin

The Four Seasons

With daily practice

'Road Closed'

What he overhears

is the tumble of dried fruit – cherries, currants, raisins, sultanas – and the rest is imagined: cinnamon, the grated rind of an orange, sifted flour … then there’s a crack – ‘never mind, let’s try another!’ – and he pictures the smashed yolk wiped from the floor before the comic repeat, but he forges on with his own task, and later lets a quarter bottle of cognac weep into a heavy brass punchbowl, watching the drenched slices of fruit submerge then reappear as he waits for the first guests; and what he sees, deep within the ripples of Christmases past, is the future: tannin stained streams as he walks through the bush, and two crocodiles thrashing in a tinted river, glimpsed from the top of the gorge …

Paul Munden

The violin

perched, slack-strung,
on the dark wooden sideboard
of your Palermitan apartment
opposite the cathedral,
a gift you didn’t yet know
how to tune, let alone play.

Your guests ignored it,
heading straight for the plates
of cheese, olives, bread,
and wine in plastic flagons
from the market, music
flowing from an amplified phone.

Smokers braved the narrow
stone balcony high above
the lines of traffic crawling
between Porta Nuova
and the sea, chains of lights
sparkling in the dusk.

Pigeons on the clocktower
became gargoyle silhouettes.
The occasional miniature
dog was lowered in a basket
from a creaking pulley
to the pavement for relief.

I wondered what else
I had failed to teach you,
and what that mattered,
watching you thread
the multilingual party
with such intuitive skill

while I, tongue-tied, retreated
to a corner with the poor violin,
turning its stiff pegs
until the levelled strings
could be at ease
with their silence.

Paul Munden

(Il Cimento dell’ Armonia e dell’ Inventione)
                    after Vivaldi
                                   for Nigel Kennedy and the Orchestra of Life

Sonnet in E Major (Spring)
allegro – largo – allegro

Ushered in by a noodling guitarist,
the birds are in full swing; for the soloist,
with this music in his veins, it’s a lark.
In his Villa shirt he chirps and chirrups
while tight, bright buds unfurl to improvise
a canopy of leaves. His supple wrist
whips up a storm then settles for reprise.

A trance … he drifts off, sprawled under the trees
among daisies and meadow buttercups,
with a sampled, softly murmuring breeze
and the viola's monotonous bark.

Bring on the cheerleaders, goat skins and pipes,
revelry that breaks into yelps and whoops …
The dogs are out – Yeah! A bump of the fist.

Sonnet in G Minor (Summer)
allegro non molto – adagio – presto

Scorched pines. A sweltering stasis. The heat
has pressed the air almost to silence. Note
follows note like stuttering beads of sweat
but there – in the bow's quick tilt – the cuckoo,
followed by a warbling dove and the trill
of the finch, those fingers thrillingly close.
Breezing triplets flutter against a beat
the north wind blasts to hell – and there’ll be more.

A fly-infested lull, a fractious growl
itching for a livewire scare. So why not –
with a stack of Marshalls to hand – let loose

the thunder and lightning for real? … One ... two
mississippi three mississippi four …
The cornfields are all trashed by golf-ball hail.

Sonnet in F Major (Autumn)
allegro – adagio molto – allegro

Jazz trumpet? It’s a party! – the harvest
gathered in. The drinking is in earnest
with flagons of claret and ale on tap;
they drink at the gallop, drink till they drop,
nod off ... only to get that second wind
and party on full pelt into the night.

Passed out, they enter a parallel realm –
a kaleidoscopic haze in which time
is an elasticated, weightless dream
in the autumnal cool – sleeping till dawn

when it’s hip flask, hunting horn, horse and hound.
One poor terrified animal must run
for its life – their sport. It gives up the fight.
Job done, they saddle up and trot back home.

Sonnet in F Minor (Winter)
allegro non molto – largo – allegro

Frost ... snow ... layers of ice. The wind has bite.
We’re shivering in its grip, a cold snap
like nothing we’ve known ... brrrrrr ... We run, and thump
our numbed, gloved hands together, stop and stamp
our snow-deep frozen boots on frozen earth.

Later, feet up, in a chair by the hearth,
I hear the pizzicato rain outside,
a soporific, intimate reprieve

before we’re back on the shifting ice, slide
and slip with skittering strings that believe
they can negotiate the cracks. The slap-
stick of our fall is what hurries our flight,
and if the wind howls through the house despite
battening it down, it's a shrill delight.

Paul Munden

(literal translations of the Four Seasons text provided by Anoushka Munden)

With daily practice

his stiff fingers found
a music of their own,
the muscle memory of his arm
a rhythm akin
to the unique routine

of a bird of paradise,
waiting for her to come
to his patch of ground
and allow him to impress.

Paul Munden

Road Closed

was emphatic,
but the rusty sign
hung on an open gate,
allowing him to kid himself
and drive on through –
up the narrow sandy track
in an erratic

sequence
of hairpin bends
towards the summit,
and as he continued,
with ever less option
to reverse, he began to forget
the warning, his lapsed

judgement eclipsed
by glimpses of magnificence
beyond – hills, folding
to a pale blue
infinity –
until the sudden, huge stone
fallen into the road.

He felt the absurdity
as he tried first to move it,
then – back in the car, holding
his nerve – to gauge the space
between rock
and scarp,
all to within an inch

of his life.
And for what? –
the view from the top?
His sense of privilege
was equally a trespass
on the sublime;
He longed to remain

in the melancholy
of his private wilderness
with time
and empty sky his friends,
rather than once again
face the crumbling precipice
of his own folly.

Paul Munden

Mark O’Connor was born in Melbourne in 1945, and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He lives in Canberra. In 1999 he was the Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Fellow, and thereafter a Visiting Scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. He has taught English at several universities, has published fifteen books of verse, and won many prizes and awards. His poetry shows a special interest in the natural world. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts to ‘report in verse on the Games’. He holds a doctorate in Shakespearian studies, and is the editor of Oxford University Press’ much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry.

Poems

Autumn in Acton

The abiding remorse

Remembering Diana Spencer

John at 70 years, the Marriage 40 years old

Balloons over our city

Further Reading

Mark O'Connors website: www.australianpoet.com/about.html

Shakespeare in modern English: http://shakespeare-in-modern-english.blogspot.com.au

Season of fructose gladness, its sugars mixed
With melancholy for declining life and year.
Now the year turns downwards to the compost tip

Rosella parrots with their sideways treadle-ing claws
Move transverse up the fire-thorn sprays,
Munch golden berries in a slow exultant dance.

But for students in the Acton antipodes the autumn is springtime,
When migrating flocks settle in to fresh campus groves
The newcomers mating and bonding, to raucous musical grunts
And thumps that threaten the ancient roof-ridges
Give their elders the fidgets
Et gaudeamus igit-
ur! In this Academe spring of new units with scarce an exam in sight,
Time when the teachers cut just a little slack,
As they unfold ancient wisdoms
For the briefly young in that old community
Whose anthem is juvenes dum sumus
And aims to chart our human humus.

Soon frosts will crispen till the last leaves crash
Tinkling on the frozen earth. But for me
June’s a white cockatoo, with pale crest of lemon,
perched in a poplar of burning gold
and the dawn mist wisping up like smoke.

Mark O’Connor

‘We were two cranes, each broken-winged,
that hopped and panicked in the dust

till welded, seamless, rib to rib,
we sprang with equal, matchless strokes

to glide above the circling clouds
beyond the glance of counsellors,
perfect, alone, in company’

So wrote the Emperor
of plump Kwei Fei, whose blood
his generals poured in dust, whose love
cost him and China everything.

Despised and hobbling on the earth,
his patient brush stroked out these lines,
still unrevoked.

Mark O’Connor

Quasi-translation by Mark O’Connor. The story of the eighth century Tang emperor Xuan Zhong and his ‘perfumed concubine’ Yang Kwei Fei (or Gui Fei) is famous in China. The poem is loosely based on a couplet from the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi’s ‘The Abiding Remorse’.

Trapped and snapped,
cut from twisted tin,
a blowfly on the windscreen
preening its compound lenses.

Nothing to be done. They sewed her back,
packed the cut flesh in ice and flowers.

Not one for white gloves,
kneeling to the young and the dying
while those lanky knees pushed out,
she proved kings were film stars,
then deposed the prince.

TV made it like a death in the family;
anchors maudlinly adding ‘Diana up-dates’
to pre-recorded game-shows.

The decent, balding would-be-king arrived,
his face the color of scraped beef,
and claimed his wife from the dead boyfriend.
Dying, she gave back his crown.

It was a young girl’s dream of ceremony
to be so taken up, believing
husbands mean ‘I love’ when they say ‘I do’.
As he led her into the public's den
she had leaned so shyly on him,
seeking that ease and devotion
reserved for another.

Even London held off its weather.
A minute-bell tolled each stage of her ride
with tall men like centaurs riding beside her,
spattered with seasonal flowers
canonised as a fallible saint, a flame
strongest when half blown out.

The crowd gave her the gift of its silence,
the sound of lilies striking on tarmac
like one hand clapping on earth;
and snuffled its dreams of her into a million hankies.

At the palace, a weeping wall
of flowers and plastic. Commentators,
rich from tickling the public’s itch,
pondered such public decencies; and a priest asked
why folk should worship with lilies a mateless mother,
child-like and adulterous, whose knack was to set
her bruised heart helplessly on display.

Round her corpse they wrapped natural ermine
cotton and timber; as if sending her back
to some green Avalon, lake-island, out
of a life lived in the smell of fresh paint.

Mark O’Connor

For John and Bini Malcolm

Just when you think it’s all coming together
And you could take a bit more of this partnership,
Time coughs and observes, it’s been forty years now, more than average,
And maybe it’s time to sum up.

In the road to the planets and stars
The step from the croft to the town was the harshest
Then – for a Scot – the plunge into alien England.
Later to the India Company, an ancestor writing poems in Suthron,
Letters to the Iron Duke from Mount Malcolm, being
General to a chunk of sub-continent, and a local god.

– And then there was Bini, her Afrikaans history
re-uniting Europe with the old, old family home in Africa,
Bini with her wise eye for the World’s old follies
To match John’s shyer, slyer, mode of speech,
Endlessly curious and unshocked at how the world works
More amused than indignant, if eager for better things.
Early-risers, in search of the fourth Transcendental
Ever lively, eclectic, curious and unsated.

In marriage as in an apple grove, half the grafts take.
Some wither at once, snap at the union in winter storms
Or die from delayed sap-strife.
But sometimes the nick of a side-graft takes,
The delicate cambium knits around alien tissue
Till the two inarching stems gladly grow
To a mossy triumphal arch that props a green forest,
Beloved of the birds, red with apples,
Famous for hospitality ...

Sundry sons were among the fruits.
They played and fought like wildcats
Then lengthened their limbs and their dignity
Gained degrees, turned bankers and such,
& attracted lasses
That might turn them into pater familiases

Strange how each generation
Climbs to some ledge unknown to the parents,
Yet would never know how to take up
The empire that grandma and grandpa laid down
Each night by their bedside.

‘He’s not the father of my children,’ a woman once told me,
‘He’s my friend. I don’t like the fathers of any of my children.’
But how much happier is Bini who can say:
I do like the father of my children.

Let us be grateful for this pair
Forty years into their union’s flowering prime.
He with the longest and fittest legs in Woollahra
She with the wisest, sharpest, kindest remarks –
A pair who reversing time’s laws, have turned their wondering children
Into the fixed point for the Wandering Olds
Only those truly stable at home can travel so blithely
Such a centrifugal force demands pivots of humour, and love.

Old Sir John Malcolm may have thought:
‘A soldier, sir, is better accommodated than with a wife.’
But this pair travels as one. Their letters
Full of names Evelyn Waugh would love: Major Fonseca, Father Danny,
Colonel Mohite of Dingley Dell India, the Wadias,
the squirish Patwardans
(Their mansion hemmed in by the Tantric Sex Ashram),
St Godfrey of Iraq, Chestertonian poet,
And his wife Honor, true Vicar of Dibley.
All these are not types but friends, well loved
Their India no Naipaul-ish Area of Darkness.

What can we wish, as the seven-O and four-O numbers come up
For John and Bini, who have used time so richly
But chronia polla – a rich store of time still to come;
And more years to amaze us.
Long may they rise early, and set late.

Mark O’Connor

Those big laundry baskets heaving at anchor,
a soft lift and fall
like a cat landing on feathers

Nervous passengers toeing the frost,
invited at last, to stand packed
in a cut-down phone booth of wicker.

Each shot of flame brings a slow delaying lift

then the light up-gathering pull of nylon
as tugged seams unite to draw on hawsers, cats-cradles

– a slow lift to grass-brushing height,
then with no further effort, liquidly, purely up.

Hopping trees at the lawns’ edge
like slow random Space-invader probes

slipping sideways, they float

A flight of tumescent tear-drops
in all the colours of happiness,
half planned beauty, half promotional hot air.

Like soap bubbles, wobbling into shape,
changeable cloud-dragons, unsteady
as a puppy on his first leash, then,
pleats tensing,

gorgeous supermodels rising off the sliprails
they stream down the catwalk and over the Bridge

their glorious wobbling glide
an uneasy suspension.
over crisp tree-filled suburbs
of currawong, magpie, galah.

Sleek silks hanging on nothingness,
with surfaces of skin and paint
over hot innards that thrust them up.

In the silent competitive climbing
a splotch of dawn like a rouge-blob on each cheek. Yet
in the midst of glamour they are mortal.

Drifting out of our city like happiness
over indifferent magpies clearing their throats,
two of them, blown too close, dance a deadly tango
suddenly graceless, with shouted comments in Strine.

Sky cadillacs, riding on springs of air
to crash at last, self-wrecked,
on some golf course where, with a nod to physics,
they swoon into gravity,
these transcontinental ephemerals
whose glories, swirled and stowed in a ute-sized box,
vanish in mufti into the city-bound traffic.

Mark O’Connor

Anita Patel has had work published in various journals including Conversations (Pandanus Press, ANU), Block 9, Burley Journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Demos Journal, Mascara Literary Review, and Not Very Quiet Journal. Her poem 'Women’s Talk' won the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Prize in 2004. She has performed her work at many events, including at the Canberra Multicultural Festival, the Poetry on the Move Festival, Noted Festival, Floriade Fringe Festival, and at Word in Hand in Glebe. She was the feature poet for the Mother Tongue Showcase at Belconnen Arts Centre in 2016. She was the guest editor for Issue Two of Not Very Quiet Journal.

Statement

'My poetry comes from lived experience and ordinary moments – from connections with nature, with people, with objects and with places. I have lived in Canberra for decades. This city, with its four seasons, perfect light, and soft-painted hills, is firmly embedded in my heart. I walk around the lake just about every day and there is always something (sometimes almost imperceptible) that stops me in my tracks and takes my breath away. 'Winter Pageant' and 'Mr. Darwin's Room' are Canberra poems.

While I am as Australian as a pair of sandy thongs, I am also part of the Asian diaspora. My mixed heritage (Indian, Malay, Portuguese) is tightly woven into my identity. 'Cane Cutter’s Bride: Museum of Fiji' and 'Wajah / Muka' articulate the bond that I have with my language, my history and my cultural roots. 'Cane Cutter’s Bride' and 'Women’s Talk' are poems about women. 'Cane Cutter’s Bride' was inspired by an old photo of a young Indian bride in the Museum of Fiji. I felt a profound empathy for this unknown woman who, like so many of my own female relatives, was forced to be resilient despite having no power and no choices. 'Women’s Talk' is about the complex, subtle, and textured relationship that we, women, have with one another. Finally, I simply love words – the sound and shape of them, the way that they sit on a blank page. Poetry is all about making words sing perfectly together. Honing a poem is the most joyful task.'

Anita Patel

Poems

Cane Cutter's Bride: Museum of Fiji

Wajah/Muka

Winter Pageant

Women's Talk

Mr. Darwin's Room (National Museum of Australia)

Suddenly you accost me
with silent sepia eyes –
a sallow smudge of newsprint
hidden among weapons and bones.
You shrink and flutter
like a frightened bird
          trapped
in the crimson mesh
of your wedding sari.
I am caught
in your dark gaze
in the tattered trace
of hands and face:
ragged remnants
of a fragile gift
carefully wrapped
and dispatched
with good wishes
to an alien land.

Anita Patel

Published in The Canberra Times, 29 September 2007

Two words for face in my language:
Wajah from the Arabic wajh
rolls off the tongue sweetly
and melts like honey
in our mouths …
Wajah – a fitting sound for
the cherished tenderness of
a human face …
And yet …
I prefer the honest drum beat
of muka. An island word
harvested from salty seas and
fertile earth, blown through palm fronds
and tossed about in monsoon rain-
coconut redolent thud of pestle in
mortar – mu–ka …
hammer hard syllables
chiselling the naked face
of my Malay ancestors …
When you lift the soft, saffron
silk mask of wajah …
there is only muka.

Anita Patel

Through damp drifts of umber
ducks parade past the National Museum.
A feathered armada,
flashing iridescent epaulettes,
they salute themselves
in plate glass windows.

And a flutter of parrots –
emerald and rose
hails their arrival ...

a flurry of silken scarves
flung in admiration
landing gently on the
ice pale grass.

Anita Patel

Have you noticed
how the purl and plain of
women’s talk is tangled
and snarled
when a man enters the room?
Suddenly stitches are dropped
irretrievably
in the middle of a pattern
worked on for hours
and the cosy blend of colours
dark and light is
snagged and knotted
beyond repair.
The ropy twist
of mannish yarn
weaves its way
harsh and relentless
into the whispered silk
of confidences,
ruining the rich brocade
of spoken moments
(embroidered daintily
with truth and terror)
and the fine cobweb lace
of lies half told.
No deft fingers
can save the garment now
it falls
in a cambric crush
next to the broken loom –
the last threads hang loose
a ravelment of bombast
and vainglory.

Anita Patel

Published in Block 9

'A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.'
Charles Darwin

Inside a structure
of rainbow loops and angles
spangle whirling
over a cellophane lake
is Mr. Darwin’s room,
exactly as he left it:
cards tucked in the mirror,
pictures on the wall,
a basket by the fire,
unassuming clutter.
And all around the mutter
as foreign children stop and count
his instruments and books
(microscopes and jars)
odd playthings of a lifetime.

Outside …
a blue untroubled sky
rustles gently in the water
antipodean parrots flit
and settle on the grass –
their ancestors are under glass
inside this unfamiliar place –

and an old man’s chair is empty.

Anita Patel