Winter Poetry Feature Part 2: Temperton, Beveridge, Leber, Cahill and Lea [04.07.2011]
Of all our member presses that publish poetry, a fair few of them – if not all – are of the we-publish-poetry-because-we-love-poetry ilk. This seems like an obvious thing to claim. And it is. But it needs to be acknowledged, here and now, because it speaks to a vibrant enthusiasm for poetry that small presses in Australia have in spades – even when a profit may not be reached. But then, well, the most common usage of ‘profit’ is one fettered to cash. Which, in poetry’s case, is not entirely fair.
Of course presses would love to see sales roll in from everything they publish. But Australia profits handsomely, culturally – lyrically, literately, linguistically – from the small presses putting out new collections each year, not to mention the print and online magazines and newspapers which continue to feature poems. And this dedication sustains no matter how many oranges and pineapples return to keep scurvy at bay from presses' coffers. And we applaud that. So welcome to a new occasional instalment on the SPLOG that features a diverse line-up of poets from around Australia who have publications from an equally diverse assortment of SPUNC member presses.
By no means is this an exhaustive list of poets and small presses. Not anywhere close. Simply, a posh hors d'œuvr course of what’s out there. If one, two or all pique your inner poeticity, we encourage you to pick up a copy of the book(s) noted after each of the authors' pieces.
Now then, in no particular order or theme …
An excerpt from ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife’ ~ Barbara Temperton
Dawn.
There’s still a bit of south in the wind.
Waves have worried the beach in two.
The keeper’s wife collects driftwood, feathers.
There is something about the air,
the intensity of colour,
that awes her. This place is an X
on her map of moments with God.
Whales exhale beyond the wave line,
flippers and tail flukes slow-arc from the sea.
At the high tide line: cuttlefish, shells, kelp,
and a dead shearwater half-cast in sand,
pinions mocked by breeze, the memory of flight.
Another bird, feet at pointe, Degas’ ballet
framed by footprints of dogs and gulls.
Thereafter, another seven, bills locked mid-cry.
Mist begins its skyward drift with the sun,
horses and fierce riders
thunder through the curtain into day.
Sea’s silver, molten.
The air taking on something like substance,
as though she could reach out, touch something solid.
She’s either left the world
or just stepped into it.
This poem appears in Barbara Temperton’s collection, Southern Edge, published by Fremantle Press
A Shanty ~ Judith Beveridge
Old Man Seiner lets the lines
go out past shells that rattle
across dark, nautical floors.
Old Man Seiner hears blood
in the blue-lit corridors, then paces
the sea with a zinc-steel sun.
Old Man Seiner makes a shore
then sheathes his needles.
He holds his net to deck
the trawlers free of whispers.
He works each thread
clear of the limpet tempers
of the sailors who drop
each net, then sit for hours
in bottled depths to talk
of what the shadow-foulers do
to crews of wind-blown yachts.
Old Man Seiner floats
his wrack. He knows that by
the lilting tinkle of a boat
at anchor, or by the fish
that drift between a cork
and sinker, through all
the uncaulked cracks he’ll
keep his shuttle back.
Old Man Seiner works
the docks, casts his gill-slit eyes
to narrow depths. He knows
how his horizons bear
his yachts, in candle mass,
and how the heron’s flight
can put a weighted cadence
on the tongues of men whose
hook-snared fingers fray
old rope, whose eyes enlist
the lights of devilfish.
He brings his shuttle back
across the mist, across the weed
to trail his angling sight,
across the windblown
off-shore wave-crests
breaking into starry nights.
This poem appears in Judith Beveridge’s collection, Honey and Storm, published by Giramondo Publishing.
The Sighs of the Skull ~ Michelle Leber
The door beneath the breastbone
is shut. Birds, summer, even
a jasmine mood at dusk cannot enter.
This bolted door, stopping
his snowfall breath,
strangers in need to stealing fire.
Betrayal, my spinning piglet
locked within. Scratching
at the lower realms.
You know to open the door
even for a chink, a pin-eyed stag
may look in for company.
It will graze on emerald grass.
Its tail, flicking dirt into
your mouth.
This is a new poem from Michelle Leber. Her collection, The Weeping Grass, is published by Australian Poetry Centre, now Australian Poetry.
Dying to Meet You ~ Michelle Cahill
for Aravind Adiga
Maybe it wasn’t deferred by the hardness of rain,
my lack of sincerity, your lover, an unfinished book,
a hangover; the cigarettes I didn’t smoke to save
my lungs. I wasn’t breathless last night. I dreamt
an email I opened from a publisher wishing me well
was an awful sign. You didn’t even enter my dream,
though it would make poetic sense to mention loss
in imagined fragments: how I left my bangles by your
bedside table; how you asked me to slide them off
so they wouldn’t chafe or ring the way memory does;
how you covered my pillowed face under a cold sheet.
I woke with a slight headache to morning’s amnesia,
some days I know not who I am, or how to begin.
Yet, you’re right. No one is dying to meet someone
like you. The poor are buried alive in seismic rubble,
their children swallowed by tsunamis are casualties
of global warming, over-population, urban sprawl.
How then to measure a grief which I sometimes desire
to share? How not to read your remarks as if you came
like an electronic prayer into my head? Is it worth you
knowing I trembled this morning at the very thought
of our real bodies meeting? Would I be grave? I am
so brittle lately, imperfectly divided. I am untouched.
In my yoga, you’re not the Bhráman from whom I draw
breath. Perhaps, by now, I might know the epic nature
of suffering; the way we can be prisoners and still free,
not by purchase or design. By readiness for what this
day brings do we exist in the spaces between words.
This poem appears in Michelle Cahill’s new collection, Vishvarūpa, published by 5 Islands Press.
The Chinese Foot ~ Bronwyn Lea
The bandage wraps figure eights
around her heel, across the crest
of her foot and tightly over her toes
(which are black and pressed
to her sole) so that her arch breaks
magnificently with the steep pitch
of a temple. She lets her husband
touch it. He uses the measure
of his thumbtip-to-first-knuckle
along her lily foot and counts one,
two, three and smiles. He brings it
to his lips, inhales, and thanks
the ancestors, who also smile
and wish him many sons. He has
loved her since first he saw her,
swaying in the courtyard like
a little tree, her long braid blue
under the moon, her lily feet
dressed in green apple silk shoes.
His mouth fell open at the sight,
but he was careful when he
exhaled not to blow her over
with the white cloud of his breath.
This poem appears in Bronwyn Lea’s collection, Flight Animals, published by University of Queensland Press.
Subscribe to our RSS feed
Follow us on Twitter