Drought Travelling west the land burns but the sky withholds its cure.   Slouched in his ute a farmer watches stock grazing roadsides, wonders how long he can cling to land tortured by extremes, when he’ll be forced to sell the genetic line, fine-tuned for fertility, once fleshed for profit.   How long? The question […]

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Ascent There is a stew, a simple meaty stew in the oven and the smell of it slowly makes itself at home. It drapes itself around the curtains, winds around the jar of wooden spoons, whispers to the piled dishes in the sink. The two dogs lie paralysed with desire for the goodness of it, […]

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It would be impossible in a short article to do justice to “the frightening fecundity” (in the words of Kingsley Amis) of Anthony Burgess, or John Burgess Wilson, to give him the name he was born with. So it seems to me better to come in at an angle, as it were, and look at […]

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Be of the Right in Australia's literary milieu and editors won't even respond to your submissions. Publishing subsidies prove unobtainable, there are no invitations to writers' festivals and curators of anthologies spurn your work. It is that political

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There are many fine war poets, and I particularly like reading those of the First World War. Curiously, in equal measure I enjoy reading both the war jingoists such as Rupert Brooke and Jessie Pope as well as the dark, stark realism of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was an […]

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I live, I still live, and I think many of us live inside the world Neruda discovered. —Ariel Dorfman The voice is perhaps the most lasting incarnation of any existence … It is in voices … that the dead continue to live. —Alastair Reid There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same […]

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Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study by Robert Bagg & Mary Bagg University of Massachusetts Press, 2017, 392 pages, US$32.95 ____________________________________________   You, whoever you are, If you want to walk with me you must step lively. —“Running”   What is an individual thing? —“An Event”   Once, sitting next to Richard Wilbur […]

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This year is the twentieth anniversary of the death of the Australian poet John Forbes. Perhaps, then, it’s opportune to revisit his legacy. This was done, to some extent, in 2002 with the publication of Ken Bolton’s homage to john forbes, which includes an essay by Ivor Indyk titled “The awkward grace of John Forbes”. […]

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Sister   When my sister slipped away her slippers fell downstairs slapping the sleeping dog’s nose. She patted him back to rest before silence sealed her closing of the sliding door behind her and I, in my nightgown, slept through it all, unstirred. So how could I know?   I am a slip of my […]

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Homework   In the darkness, a grey gaggle of teenage boys, joshing, jostling, explosions of cheap expletives, a fog of Lifebuoy soap and stale body odour, testosterone-topped. Grey school-uniforms dark in the cold evening, occasional sparks struck with fierce skill against the black from steel-tipped heels of heavy Clarks shoes.   Then the neon glare […]

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