NEW! SOUTHERLY hits the streets - of yr neighbourhood and cyberspace

A rich and satisfying issue, not least because there are two poems of mine in the print edition and another in The Long Paddock (click to view). Take a look at the rich line up:

CONTENTS

POETRY

Michael Sharkey, Where the Bunyip Builds its Nest: Five Centos
Jennifer Maiden, The Pearl Roundabout
Greg McLaren, Gas Works at Little Manly Point with mother and child
Philip Hammial, Duffer
Maria Takolander, Bestiary
John Kinsella, Jam Tree Gully Poems
Peter Kirkpatrick, The Angels in the House
Sarah Jane Barnett, Marathon Men
Dimitra Harvey, Sport
Tom Coverdale, The Gulf Reclaimers
Michael Crane, Poetry and Violins
Kate Middleton, Gretel, Hansel
Kevin Gillam, when they fell
Bruce Dawe, Losing Bella
Peter Bakowski, Friends since high school
Thomas Shapcott, Mt. Glorious
Andrew Burke, The Name of the Game, Dunes at Night
Julie Maclean, cassowary
D.J. Huppatz, Surplus
Michelle Leber, A 27th Century BCE Chinese Inventory of the Bird empire
Michael Farrell, Abstract Alcohol
Margaret Bradstock, Ask not
Peter Dawncy, homeward
Craig Powell, “and catch the heart off guard”, Fort Da
Michael Brennan, Afterlife, MDPV
Corey Wakeling, Jim Courier the Third
Graham Kershaw, Ingenium 
Ian Gibbins, Knuckey Street, Darwin

ESSAYS

Michael Ackland, Behold Burton’s Tomb: Mortality and Escapism in Murray Bail’s Homesickness
Kevin Hart, Susannah Without the Cherub
Michael Buhagiar, F.C.S. Schiller and Brennan’s The Burden of Tyre
John Jenkins, Poetry as Cinema
Mike Ladd, Notes Toward a Radio Poetics
Suzie Cardwell, Kristevan Intertextuality and John Scott’s Warra Warra
Lachlan Brown, The Edges and Voices of Silence in Kevin Hart’s Wicked Heat

STORIES

Matthia Dempsey, One Week Gone
Greg Bogaerts, The Market Porter
Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones, Green Cupcakes
Liz Gallois, Playground Duty on Little Bourke Street

REVIEWS

Craig Powell on Francis Webb, Collected Poems, ed. Toby Davidson
Kate Middleton on Kate Kennedy, The Taste of River Water
Corey Wakeling on Gig Ryan, New & Selected Poems
Duncan Hose on Benjamin Frater, 6am in the Universe
Michelle Cahill on Elizabeth Campbell, Error
Andrew Carruthers on Geoff Page, A Sudden Sentence in the Air
Bonnie Cassidy on Jaya Savige, Surface to Air

And in the Long Paddock…

POETRY

Rae Desmond Jones, Ash Wednesday
Stuart Barnes, Cocoon
Andrew Burke, “The birds are still in flight…”
Liam Byrne, soviet kitsch
Peter Dawncy, ruins
Michael Farrell, Telephone
Liam Ferney, NC-17
Ian Gibbins, Dr Korsakoff and Colleagues Report
Philip Hammial, Dear Sisters and Brothers
D.J. Huppatz, Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels
Greg McLaren, The rusting land…, from Broken
Ng Mei-kwan, Rainstorm (trans. Bonnie S. McDougall)
Brenda Saunders, Looking for Bulin Bulin
Tegan Schetrumpf, The Cotton Mill
Barnaby Smith, Imbalance
Corey Wakeling, The Vault

STORIES

Annabel Duckworth-Smith, The Trick with the Hat and the Dove
Mark O’Flynn, The Isthmus
Sue Woolfe, To Kill or to Hit, extract from a work in progress

REVIEWS

Pam Brown on Louis Armand, Letters from Ausland
Melinda Bufton on Best Australian Poems 2011, ed. John Tranter
Elizabeth Campbell on Mal McKimmie, The Brokenness Sonnets I-III
Gerald Keaney on Luke Davies, Interferon Psalms
Tom Lee on Astrid Lorange, Eating and Speaking
Corey Wakeling on Duncan Hose, One Under Bacchus
Petra White on Fiona Wright, Knuckled
and Libby Hart, This Floating World

INTERVIEW

Laurie Duggan, with Fiona Scotney, 17 December 2010

Double Dougan Burke Book Launch - You're Invited!

cover image Circumvesuiana

Andrew Burke and Lucy Dougan invite you and all your family and friends to a combined BOOK LAUNCH at Mattie Furphy House (next to Tom Collins House, Swanbourne) 2pm-4pm on Sunday 20th May.

Picaro Press has published Lucy's ON THE CIRCUMVESUVIANA and Walleah Press is the publisher of Andrew's UNDERCOVER OF LIGHTNESS: NEW & COLLECTED POEMS.

These collections will be launched by Professor Philip Mead, poet and Chair of Australian Studies at UWA.

Moonshine and sunshine will be served, with the occasional cosy biscuit.

About ON THE CIRCUMVESUVIANA:

A special tenderness and subtlety characterises these poems. ... Dougan's achievement is to remind us that place is a mysterious part of identity and that families - weirdly and wonderfully - are always sites of revelation.   - Gail Jones

About UNDERCOVER OF LIGHTNESS: NEW & COLLECTED POEMS:

Here is a poet to hail and to treasure. - Thomas Shapcott

This book is full of illumination, clear intelligence, music and - most welcome - a sense of humour. 

                                                             - Jill Jones

Auckland poet bound for London’s poetry Olympics

The University of Auckland’s Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh is taking part in the largest gathering of the world’s poets in history.

Poets, rappers, spoken word artists, singers and storytellers are gathering for the Poetry Parnassus festival in London from 26 June to 1 July.

It will feature poetry from each of the 204 nations competing in the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Dr Marsh will represent the country of her maternal grandfather’s birth, Tuvalu. She was selected from 6,000 public nominations made for the event.

“Vaelei Tusitala is my grandfather’s name. He was born in Tuvalu and moved to Samoa to study at Malua Theological College. Tusitala means teller of tales. It’s a legacy handed down to me from my grandfather,” Dr Marsh says.

The Poetry Parnassus is an opportunity for Dr Marsh to tell tales about Tuvalu on a global stage. She will perform a sequence about the impact of global warming on one of the world’s lowest lying nations.

“I hope to bring awareness and understanding to a beautiful island nation, its peoples and its ways. I will also perform poems based on diasporic perspectives on the faatele, a customary Tuvalu dance. It’s a privilege to represent my grandfather’s island and I hope my voice honours Tuvaluans everywhere.”

Dr Marsh, from the Department of English, is a celebrated Pacific poet. Her first collection of poems, the award-winning Fast Talking PI, appeared in the New Zealand Bestseller List in 2009 and won the New Zealand Post Jessie McKay Best First Book Award in 2010.

Her research at the University concerns pioneering Pacific women writers, who she says were influential in giving a voice to Pacific women and children as a means of empowerment in a largely male-dominated post-colonial era.

She was the University’s first Pacific Islander to graduate with a PhD in English, where she now currently teaches papers on New Zealand and Pacific Literature, and Creative Writing.

Dr Marsh established and coordinates Pasifika Poetry, an online hub celebrating the poetry of tagata o te moana nui, the peoples of the Pacific. Visit Pasifika Poetry.

As part of the festival poets will perform at free events, and will contribute a poem to a landmark anthology to be published celebrating the gathering.

Poetry Parnassus is part of the London 2012 Festival, a 12-week celebration running from 21 June until 9 September 2012 bringing together leading artists from across the world to the UK.
 

Selina Tusitala Marsh is also a guest judge at the 2012 Poetry Slam to be held at The University of Auckland on May 11.
 

'The Noble Nature' by Ben Jonson

     It is not growing like a tree
     In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
          A lily of a day
          Is fairer far in May,
     Although it fall and die that night—
     It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.

from Amazon: HERE

His [Jonson's] adoption of classical ideals was combined with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and a strong faith in native idiom. Within the urbane elegance of his verse forms he contrived a directness and energy of statement clearly related to colloquial speech, and this characteristic fusion of restraint and vitality gave to the seventeenth-century lyric its most distinctive quality. As well as the entire body of Jonson's non-dramatic verse, extensively annotated, this edition contains many of the songs from his plays and masques and his translation of 'Horace, of the Art of Poetry'. His 'Conversations with Drummond', which adds much to our sense of the man, appears as an Appendix, as does 'Discoveries'; together they shed valuable light on Jonson's poetic theory and practice.

One character displays another at Perth Poetry Club

Above, see Professor Glen Phillips holding up one of his four poems based on their central Chinese character at Perth Poetry Club at the Moon Cafe on a recent Saturday afternoon. As a guest of PPC, and a seasoned campaigner, Glen suggested a theme to the audience - Don't let your poems gather dust in a bottom drawer. Get them out into the public anyway you can. In this day and age it is economical to publish your own works if the old established channels are too slow and persnickety when it comes to design, illustration, etc. 

His examples included a new book on the brink of publication, titled Six Seasons (ICLL at ECU and a Chinese university), large format but thin volume of Chinese character poems (illustrated above) and a wonderful large format tabletop collection of poems with matching landscape photos. 

Perth Poetry Club meets each and every Saturday at 2pm-4pm at 

The Moon Cafe, 323 William Street, Northbridge

Arts Queensland Poetry Prizes to Win

Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry

Named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. Entrants may submit multiple entries with up to three poems per entry; each entry must be accompanied by a separate Entry Form and a separate Entry Fee. Entry Fee : $20
Entries close by 5pm Tuesday 10 July 2012.
1st Prize : $1,000 plus 1 week fully paid at Varuna Writers House
2nd Prize : $500
3rd Prize : $250

Download guideline and submission forms:  Entry form Val Vallis Award 2012

Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize

Named in honour of a distinguished Queensland Poet, the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize is committed to encouraging Queensland poets. Now in its 9th year, this prestigious prize for an unpublished poetry manuscript comes with a total prize money of $3,000 together with a publishing contract with University of Queensland Press.

Entry fee: $20
Entries close by 5pm Thursday 12 July 2012.

Download guideline and submission forms:  Entry form Thomas Shapcott Prize 2012

The winners will be announced at the opening night of the Queensland Poetry Festival at the Judith WrightCentre for Contemporary Arts, on 24 August 2012.

npr looks at Mark Strand's 'Almost Invisible'

Hardcover, 50 pages, Random House Inc, List Price: $US26 | purchase

from npr:

American poetry's recognition of the prosaicness — if not profanity — of our age and culture takes many forms. Poets embrace pop or pursue the workings of the mind with what Robert Bly called associative leaping. They examine rhetoric by mashing up archaisms with the hypernew. They resist poetry's traditional resistance to technology, fashion, advertising or fad — or they follow someone like Ashbery into poetic abstraction.

Mark Strand's Almost Invisible leans on yet older forms, veiling its poetry in a fabulistic shell. The book consists of 47 deadpan, mildly absurdist parables on aging, failure and incapacity. While Strand has done this before, the poems bank on the possibility that the reader will appreciate how his form has matured.

Read article HERE

An excerpt:

Poem of the Spanish Poet

In a hotel room somewhere in Iowa an American poet, tired of his poems, tired of being an American poet, leans back in his chair and imagines he is a Spanish poet, an old Spanish poet, nearing the end of his life, who walks to the Guadalquivir and watches the ships, gray and ghostly in the twilight, slip downstream. The little waves, approaching the grassy bank where he sits, whisper something he can't quite hear as they curl and fall. Now what does the Spanish poet do? He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a notebook, and writes:

Black fly, black fly Why have you come

Is it my shirt My new white shirt

With buttons of bone Is it my suit

My dark-blue suit Is it because

I lie here alone Under a willow

Cold as stone Black fly, black fly

How good you are To come to me now

How good you are To visit me here

Black fly, black fly To wish me good-bye

From Almost Invisible by Mark Strand. Copyright 2012 by Mark Strand. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

National Trust Heritage Festival

The Fellowship of Australian Writers (WA) invites you to make the most of an Open Day at Allen Park Heritage Precinct in Swanbourne, where you can visit two houses with a special link to the history of Australian literature.

Tom Collins House was built and lived in by Joseph Furphy, known as the Father of the Australian novel for his novel 'Such Is Life', written under his nom-de-plume, Tom Collins. Relocated from its original site on Servetus Street, Swanbourne in 1996, Tom Collins House is now situated in Allen Park, Swanbourne.

Formerly on the corner of Clement and Marmion Streets, Swanbourne, Mattie Furphy House was built in the 1920s for Joseph Furphy's son Samuel and his craftswoman wife, Sarah Martha (Mattie). Mattie Furphy was a prize-winning student of James Linton and her house is a fine example of the Art and Craft style. It featured Mattie's fine copper repousse work until this was moved to the smaller house in 1938, when the couple moved to Servetus Street.

A talk on Joseph Furphy in Western Australia and the artwork of Mattie Furphy will commence at 4pm during the Open Afternoon.

6 May 2012 2 to 5:30pm

 Talk on Joseph Furphy in WA & the artwork of Mattie Furphy @ 4pm

Admission: $5

Tom Collins House & Mattie Furphy House,
Allen Park Heritage Precinct, Corner Wood & Kirkwood Sts, Swanbourne

Penguin releases BUSHRANGERS

Nope, not poetry, not jazz or cricket - just a new Penguin book that looks downright interesting. Ever since I was knee high to a chook I've been interested in Australia's bushrangers. Sure, I watched cowboys and indians at the flicks, wore six shooters on each hip and spurs on my school shoes after school, but that was only because good material on bushrangers was hard to find in the Fifties! 

Here's the publicity blurb from the Penguin Newsletter about this book:

Bushrangers

AUTHOR: EVAN MCHUGH

From the first convict runaways to the spectacular showdown that ended Ned Kelly's career, Evan McHugh delivers true tales of daring exploits and audacious deeds.
These are incredible stories of the men - and women - who achieved fame not just by what they did, but by the way they did it. There are those who lifted themselves from downtrodden underdogs to heroes, such as Bold Jack Donohue, brave Ben Hall and Captain Thunderbolt as well as villains like Pearce the Cannibal and Mad Dog' Morgan.

Bushrangers is as fast paced as a stolen thoroughbred and as arresting as a squad of troopers. Through extensive first-hand accounts and gripping detail about Australia's lawless past, bestselling author Evan McHugh brings a life cast of roguish characters who blazed their way into Australian history.

Read a good BUSHRANGERS extract HERE.

The Trust Company as Trustee and Curtin University are pleased to invite you to the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award Oration by KIM SCOTT

Professor Kim Scott.DatDate: Tuesday 1 May 2012

Time: 6:30 pm TONIGHT May 1st
Venue: Tim Winton Lecture Theatre (building 213) Curtin University Bentley campus (see map)
RSVP: +61 8 9266 2563 or email events@curtin.edu.au by Monday 30 April 2012. Registrations essential.

The Oration will be presented by acclaimed author and 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Professor Kim Scott.

Professor Scott will be discussing what we might today make of Miles Franklin’s belief that “without an Indigenous literature, people can remain aliens in their own soil”.

Professor Scott became the first Indigenous writer to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award with his first novelBenang: From the Heart in 2000.

His most recent novel, the 2011 Miles Franklin Award-winner That Deadman Dance, was presented to US President Barrack Obama as part of a gift package from the Australian Government during his recent Australian visit.. This event is supported by 720 ABC Perth and Mornings Presenter Geoff Hutchison will emcee the event.