John Kinsella, Meg McKinlay & David Brooks @ Perth Writers Festival

As a young man, I was passionate about poetry - the history of it (or them - researching poets one by one), the reading of it, the writing of it, the sharing of it ... but life and making a living etc etc and so forth have taken the edge off, and the constant and widespread applause for the other writing forms, from novels to screenplays, has all gone a long way toward taking more glitter off. But then I hear a couple of good readings, I talk poetry and poetics with other poets, I see an audience thrilled and moved by poems spoken in a public place, and I am hooked again.

This year's Perth Writers Festival has played host to a few of my favourite Australian poets, people I'm proud to call friends: Robert Adamson, David Brooks and John Kinsella. A new face to me was Mark Tredinnick, and a quiet man in the crowd was Philip Mead. No women, you cry? Well, Meg McKinlay read and Tracy Ryan was also involved, but as a novelist.

In today's session, Kinsella, McKinlay and Brooks read, chaired by another poet, Dennis Haskell.

John read from his version of Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography. His voice suffered from the flu he was carrying, but his stage presence was enough to win the audience. Here's a taste, a Sub-Paradiso poem, Mushrooms:

It has rained enough for mushrooms to emerge,
to crack open the still crusty soil and platform their heads,
gazebos of dark and gilled orchestras

Ah, nowhere near enough, but get the book and enjoy it yourself - Divine Comedy, UQP 2008. You can also read more samples at http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14138

From 410 pages of John to Meg McKinlay's 52 page chapbook, Cleanskin, the baton change over was amazing and amusing. Meg's easy confident manner and humble performance won the crowd over in a different way than John - it was a wonderful example of the many sides of poetry. Her witty intros also helped knit the poems into a delightful sequence. Here are the final lines of In China, a poem about expecting to find and finding at least one poem in a two week visit to that exotic civilisation:

Is this what it takes, to find
the poems of away -
a first sight of home?
And so I begin.

After Meg, the dramatic sight of David Brooks: shaved head, moustache and brush beard, dressed in black. David's approach was more the classic stance of the contemporary poet, if that's not too much of a clash: he spoke clearly and elegantly to the microphone, and drew the audience in with a performance that was intimate in such a public room. His poems were all love poems from his new collection The Balcony, UQP 2008. (It was medium range length at 120 pages, btw, if you were counting.) I have met his wife, Teja, and can vouch for this accurate picture of her:

She's still at the age
where she thinks that she's immortal,
smokes too much,
drives too fast,
has the patience
of spilt quicksilver ...

Love in many disguises, or should I say, many guises, came through this poetry reading today, and served to extend the enormous poetry rush I had yesterday from Robert Adamson's reading (mainly from The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems, Black Inc. 2008)

Such a pair of days gives me the push to write more, to read more, to eulogise more - but first, I must walk the dog. While I walk, you find a poem you like and read it aloud, letting the wind carry it to others to share your joy.