From the Canberra office (Geoff Page)

Hello Poetry at The Gods supporters 

 

Please don't forget the next Gods reading on Tues May 12. It will feature Lisa Jacobson (Melb) and Andy Kissane (Syd). They're both lively readers and quality poets. Both were in The Best Australian Poems 2014 and I've appended their poems below. It'd be good to offer them a good crowd in the national capital.

Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012) won the 2014 Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for four other national awards. Her latest collection, South in the World, came out from UWAP last year.  

Andy Kissane is a Sydney poet and fiction writer who thinks Poetry at the Gods is “the best live poetry reading in Australia”. His recent books are the collection, Radiance, and a book of short stories, The Swarm. http://andykissane.com

Please note the start times i.e. dinner at 6 and readings at 7.30. If you'd like to join my tables up the front let me know or you may prefer to start your own table and book directly with The Gods on 6248 5538 or thegodscafe@gmail.com.

All the best 

Geoff 

Match Girls, 1888

She holds the frame and dips each pair of sticks

into the yellow paste that will catch and burn

in the darkest London night—a luminous ribbon,

Lucifer’s finger. When dry, her sister cuts

the matchsticks with a knife and stacks them

into boxes. The phosphorus is safe, the foreman

said, they need not fear. Yet she’s heard talk

of Bessie losing her jawbone, heard Ada say 

that they ought not eat at the work tables. 

Today she rises early, despite the beginnings

of a toothache and a raw, bleeding gum. One

must not complain. Instead, she pokes her sister

under the quilt and they laugh at their teeth, glowing

green and ghostly in the warm cave of the bed.

Andy Kissane

Morning Ride

Eltham Station, 8.01 am

School girls whinny and toss their yellow manes

in half-wild herds on board the morning train.

I’ll never be like that again, what’s quick

in them now slows in me, though I recall

their visceral scent, new-glistening, which makes

grown men and school boys shift, ambivalent

in their vinyl seats. The girls gossip and stamp

their black-laced feet. Some part their legs a bit.

Something’s begun, some urgent heartstrong need

for root and seed that no old god can halt,

no worn-out creed. The train groans to a stop.

The girls get off in a flecked-skirt, skittish mob,

disperse. And yet, the taut wire of their want

persists; their sharp desire, its imperative.

Lisa Jacobson