The Liquid Amber Poetry Prize is back, bigger and better than ever. First prize is $1000 and second prize $500. An Emerging Poet will win an editing pack with Liquid Amber. Poems on the long list will be published in our annual Anthology. Whoohoo!
This year’s theme is ‘Home’. What place or experiences evoke ‘home’ for you?
What are the textures, colours or relationships that you associate with home? What paths lead to home and how do we find them? What might it mean to find or reclaim home on stolen Country?
Check out our provocations and make a poetic response to the idea of home, in whatever ways your imagination takes you. We’re looking forward to reading your poems!
Join us on Saturday October 29, 2.30-4 at the Newport Community Centre – Anne Elvey to read from her new book Leaf (Liquid Amber) and Angela Costi to launch Increments of the Everyday. An afternoon of celebration of poetry and community! Register here: https://fb.me/e/1WMMknz3D
Liquid Amber Poetry Prize Long List announced! A terrific range of poets responded to the prompt of Encounter – what happens when one thing touches something or someone else? – and somehow the judges selected 55 poems for the long list and publication.
Like us on fb to hear the announcements of the Short List on September 1, winners on October 1. The Poetry of Encounter: Liquid Amber Prize Anthology will be launched at the December 1 Zoom Poetry so get in early with our great pre-publication deal. Thank you, wonderful poetry community!
Liquid Amber Press is delighted to publish the second edition of Dominique Hecq’s book of experimental poetry After Cage – a serial composition in word and movement on time and silence.
Join us on 7 July, 7.30pm AEST, for the zoom launch by Marion May Campbell where she will also be in conversation with Dominique about her radical poetics. Don’t miss this special poetry event – a feast of words and ideas both for practicing poets and for all of us listening, reading and thinking about poetry.
As ever, we have a tremendous line-up of open mics including our new ‘poet in the spotlight’ feature.
We’re really excited to see this terrific review of Liquid Amber’s 2021 anthology Lockdown Poetry: The Covid Long Haul out in Rochford Street Review today. Thanks to Mark Roberts of Rochford Street, Sharon Monagle for the striking cover image and to Belinda Calderone for her thoughtful reading of this collection of wonderful poems from the Liquid Amber poetry community. We are still writing into and out of the strange hiatus we found ourselves in!
Thanks to Yvonne Adami, the terrific team at the beautiful Geelong Library, fellow poets David McCooey, Jo Langdon and Cameron Lowe and emcee John Bartlett for a wonderful night of poetry celebration. Lovely to be in the space together!
Poetry lovers – don’t forget the Liquid Amber March Poetry Zoom coming up this Thursday March 17, 7.30-9.30 AEDT. Whoohoo! Be part of our growing community of those who love to write and read poetry and those who love to listen to it: We’ve got a great line-up of open mic-ers ready to go + our feature poet Mark O’Flynn is reading from his new book Undercoat: Poems about Paintings, to be launched by Peter Minter. See you there for a great night!
Register now for the Liquid Amber March Poetry Zoom and be part of our growing community of those who love to write and read poetry and those who love to listen to it: Thursday March 17, 7.30-9.30AEDT.
We’ve got a great line-up of open mic-ers ready to go + our feature poet Mark O’Flynn is reading from his new book Undercoat: Poems about Paintings, to be launched by leading Australian poet, Peter Minter. See you there for a great night! Sign up here for your free zoom link: https://liquidamberpress.com.au/events/
Detail ‘Orquevaux Village’ with permission Sharon Monagle, 2018
Welcome to another great year of poetry with Liquid Amber Press! If you love writing, reading or listening to poetry across all its wonderful voices, join us for our next free Poetry Zoom : Thursday, 17 MARCH, 7.30-9.30pm AEDT. Register (free) here to receive the link: https://liquidamberpress.com.au/events/ . Bring your friends! Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with our exciting 2022 poetry events and opportunities: https://liquidamberpress.com.au/
Our feature poet in March will be Mark O’Flynn, reading from his new book of poetry Undercoat: Poems about Paintings (Liquid Amber Press, 2022), to be launched by Peter Minter. And if you’re interested in sharing 3 mins of your own work, get on the Open Mic list quickly, by contacting: info@liquidamberpress.com.au
I’m delighted that two of my poems from these recent plague years have recently appeared in issues of APJ: ‘Online’ in Vol. 9, which explores the often surprising closeness that can come about via zoom conversations; and ‘Year of Breath,’ in Vol 11.1
My review of Hannah Kent’s powerful new novel has just come out in the summer issue of Australian Book Review – check it out. Like Kent’s other two novels, it’s about women at the edge – the edge of their own understanding, the periphery of social acceptance, the edge of what we might understand as realism. This is a narrative about traumatic change, persistence and the possibilities – as well as the limitations – of what it might mean to operate from a position of devotion.
Angophora Costata is in Christmas flower. This poem, ‘The Hum of Angophora,’ first published in Writ, is coming out in my next collection, Increments of the Everyday, with Puncher and Wattmann in 2022. I hope you enjoy it.
The Hum of Angophora
The low and knotted branches of the Angophora are laden with blossom the blush of new tips pushes into daylight like dreams although last night’s rain weighs heavy and
their fingers droop almost brushing the bark-strewn grass
noisy and flamboyant wattlebirds and eastern rosellas move along branchlets through a community of leaves calling and feeding while
magpies wait thoughtful in foliage watching the possibilities of the stirring ground
one year a pair of tawny frogmouths built a platform in the fork of a branch so that two downy chicks could sit waiting out precariousness while parents sounding softly into the darkness returned with morsels until ravens swooped spilling the contents of the nest tree mind holds them this pulse of things that live and shift and scatter
the wide and impassive generosity of its branches reach and arch twist and knot in filtered sunshine its own world of space and twig sap and leaf ant and bee the hum of
In Virginia Woolf’s life-changing novel, To the Lighthouse, the lighthouse itself – as a geographical, artistic, creative space or idea, is of course never reached. It’s dreamed about, talked about, planned for and Lily Briscoe thinks what it would mean to paint it – but it remains, deliberately, out of reach of the words’ extraordinary ebb and flow. The lighthouse is summoned into imagination but it isn’t owned or held. So I do recognize that as a place of destination, the ‘lighthouse,’ however signified, is by definition never arrived at; indeed it would be a reductive notion to think that such a thing could be achieved. However, I do want to say that when I come up the sandy, salty path that leads out onto the headland to the Griffiths Island lighthouse, my heart lifts in a way I can barely describe. This is a place where, for me, happiness arises, a place of re-centring, where it seems particularly easy to be present, simply, to smell the air, to follow the sea birds skimming the waves. Such an embodied engagement with a place, its powerful ‘here-ness,’ operates as a conduit – not for some transcendent meaning or elsewhereness, but as an experience of being fully awake, body, senses, mind, unfolding in the now. A portal to right here. A gift.
My most recent book of poetry, This Shuttered Eye (Girls on Key 2021) has been launched! Courtesy of Melbourne’s #4 Lockdown we weren’t able to gather in the Open Studio as planned – but we still had an excellent evening on zoom. The book was superbly launched by poet and colleague Anne Elvey to a ‘full gallery’ of poets, friends and family – and some open mic readings added terrific energy and variety to the evening. Thanks to Girls on Key for the event and to the wonderful Michele Seminara who edited the book – a great experience of close reading exchange. Signed copies of the book are available here.
Visual artist Sharon Monagle and I were thrilled to open the exhibition of 2020 Shelter in Place last week and to launch the book of this collaborative project – a beautiful publication by Liquid Amber Press (available at the gallery or available here).
This was a project based in individual and collective/communal responses to the challenges of 2020 – we’d love to have your company to hear me read through the year’s seasons, surrounded by Sharon’s wonderful art work: Saturday May 1, 2-4 at the Kingston G3 Art Space in Parkdale.
This Shuttered Eye – now available from Girls on Key here
I’m pleased to let you know that feminist/inclusive press Girls on Key Poetry are publishing my next book, This Shuttered Eye in 2021. Thanks Anna Forsyth and team! This is a book clustered around the experience of looking – of paying attention to the natural world as well as the world of visual art (hence the Turner image) – and what might happen when that external world, or canvas, or text… is mediated through our own point of view. The eye of perception and interpretation: shuttered, opening, closing, letting in and making sense of.
Thanks to Anne Elvey and Plumwood Mountain for publishing my review of Martin Langford’s new collection of poetry and prose, Eardrum: poems and prose about music (Puncher and Wattman, 2019). A topic that’s very close to my heart!
Here’s a poem of mine which also works to find the shared language of music and poetry:
Polyphony
This is the nature of things this dense fabric
of sound
these threads of what thrums true
in my sternum call it melody
the simultaneity of harmony where threads of pitch or
timbre might intersect surfaces tumbling and
touching each other notes that lean close then
yearn apart suspended shimmering somehow
held together here is
infinity
marshalled for a short time in the generosity
of what is beautiful
cradled in the phrasing of an idea
this pattern a language that strikes
or glides or quivers reverberating
through bodies or wood or silver the hollowed bellows
of its making scribed on air
this is the way the world turns the recurring question
My dear friend Phillip Hall has, with Jillian Hall, just published the first issue of the e-journal burrow.
I’ve been fortunate enough for them to publish a pandemic poem of mine ‘Unleavened: Easter 2020.’ What do we hang on to in such a time of loss and dislocation? And yet there is a persistence, a desire to continue; Easter is one way of telling that story.
This pair of poems – two faces of response to the pandemic we are living through – has just been published in Mensicusliterary journal. https://www.meniscus.org.au/Vol8Iss1.pdf. Thanks to Jen Webb and Shane Strange.
This poem, published as ‘Further, or Autumn Isolation 2020,’ has now been published in Text journal, special issue 58, The in/completeness of human experience.
Somewhere around early April we travelled down to our weekender to bring supplies to our daughter who was in quarantine there after returning from overseas. Coming out of the cocoon of home, I was almost surprised to see that the beautiful balmy world of autumn was still out there, patiently waiting for us, maybe wondering what we’d be like when we emerged and re-entered it.
Further
Isolation in Melbourne: April 2020
‘I love our house…It’s probably a bit of a dump to some or a castle to others, but for me it’s a light-filled container full of people I love.’ Sarah Watt[1]
The sanctity of this marked out space
this collective turning inwards
the quiet comfort of walls angle of stair
our bed creaking as we turn
ripening of garden figs in afternoon light or
voices drifting down a corridor –
while streaming away like photons dissolving in air
the further world still lies
bemused and utterly beautiful
beneath a creamy sun
its fields and stony
rises streets and verandahs all tipped
skywards and slipping
gently from summer’s ferocious grip
waiting for us – as though
through a frosted pane
we had never really seen it before
rolling out its carpets of recurrent green
never stood amongst the low thrumming
of unfolding seasons or travelled
its wide and gusting territories of shift
and hold and shift
[1] Sarah Watt and William McInnnes, Worse Things Happen at Sea: Tales of life, love, family and the everyday beauty in between,’ Hatchette, 2011, p.244.
This season of easter and of passover comes in the middle of the corona virus pandemic. Apart from the sad fact that, as in Narnia, all holidays are cancelled, it’s not a bad time to think about these narratives and traditions which concern the human relation to death and our persistent desire to somehow overcome it. It is a relationship certainly characterised by anxiety and grief; yet, at our best, we can glimpse the possibilities of change and acceptance, those small transformations of shift and slip.
1666. Bubonic plague devastates London and Isaac Newton retreats to his family home at Woolsthorpe Manor. Self-isolation, long months of being in close quarters, no external stimulus – just the quiet world around him and the rising, creative life of the mind. Quite a combination as it turned out.
What can you see, what new constellation of elements – as the noise and frenzy of the great world slows, as the quietness of garden, autumn sunlight, the passing of hours, comes inexorably into view?
First published in Plumwood Mountain, a poem from my second collection Unexpected Clearing (UWAP 2016) – certainly more prescient than I could have known.
Dear friends, we are entering the strangest and most challenging of tunnels. These last few weeks I know that I, along with everyone else, has been frantic – trying to mentally catch up to what this pandemic means, even as it keep changing, scrambling to recreate my working life from home, trying hard to manage the rising anxiety and its different manifestations, reaching out to the people I love.
Poetry has been on the back burner amidst all this. But I thought about Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (a whole year??) and thought I would try and record some of my thoughts and reflections during this unprecedented time. Please follow the blog – tell me what you’re thinking, respond to what I’m able to put out there. Let’s converse.
As we move into this uncertain time, here’s a poem from my second book Unexpected Clearing (UWAP 2016), ‘Under the Wave’, that speaks to both the risk and the possibility of such a dive:
‘Listen to the Stories Woven Around us,’ by Brooke Collins-Gearing. Cover image
It’s a great honour to be included in the most recent issue of Westerly. This poem takes me back to my own childhood, to long trips to Queensland up inland New South Wales roads – and the figure of my beloved father, always and still just at the periphery of my vision.
I was thrilled to be part of the amazing collection, The Sky Falls Down: An Anthology of Loss (Ginninderra Press), edited and lovingly curated by Terry Whitebeach and Gina Mercer. It was launched yesterday in Melbourne by Carrie Tiffany (having already been launched in Hobart).
The book is available through Ginninderra Press or at Readings in Hawthorn, where it was launched.
As Mary Oliver put it, ‘Loss is the great lesson:’ if we’re going to be open to loving we need to learn how to be open to and manage loss. The diverse contributions in this Anthology I think are all ways of struggling with this great lesson of being human.
My contribution was a poem about the ongoing experience of loss – written on the five year anniversary of the death of my father:
Five years – and still there are days when I want to pick up the phone and call you; time seeps by, and though grief loosens its cruelest hooks I remain bereft, perplexed – where are you?
Are you still sitting at your computer tapping out the stories of your life – the boy in the Queensland bush, the young man stationed in Darwin, poring over radar?
Or will I see you coming into the kitchen – a cup of tea in the offing – joining us around the table, the arc of your arms still wiry and strong?
And if I could get a line through to you – what would I say? The children are growing, beautiful, I left my job, the old cracks in the family widen and groan like lathe and plaster in the drought – I admit we are all diminished without you.
Most of all, unreconciled, I would ask you to come home – it’s enough now, please come back –
And here it is again: the persistence of that old, mad dream of restoration, when the patience of mourning, the gratitude for all the rich love you left amongst us – gives way to the shocking need for the miracle: the past intact and cupped in the broad palms of your sun-tanned hands.
I had great fun on the weekend reading at this festival event: thanks to a wonderful and receptive audience for making this such a enriching experience.
Here I am -in black and white and in colour – reading amongst some of the terrific art works!
I think maybe the most enthusiastically received poem was ‘Clothesline’ – a poem that comes from my book, Even in the Dark (UWAP 2013). It’s a little window both into the pleasures of doing laundry and the possibilities for that interstitial moment , when we see the ordinary in a different way:
Is there ever a straight path forward? What happens when we wander in the so-called weeds, a ramble of body and ideas?
I’ll be giving a poetry reading on Saturday July 6, 2pm at the No Vacancy Gallery in the QV centre, as part of the women, work and wandering festival. This is a free event, but you do need to register.
As many of you will know, it’s just recently been the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth – that amazing American poet of teeming cities, meditations on life and loving, and of course that great and terrible experience of the Civil War. My poem, selected for this celebratory collection, Endlessly Rocking (ed Stan Galloway and Nicole Yurcaba), takes as its point of reference, the figure of Whitman as he travelled to the hospitals of the Civil War, horrified by the scale of the suffering and spectacle and beauty of so many violently damaged young men.
The poem is dedicated not only to Whitman himsef, that ‘bewhiskered emissay,’ but to my friend, fellow writer and Whitman -o-phile, Lindsay Tuggle.
Mary Oliver in 1964. Photograph by her partner, Molly Malone Cook, from Our World by Mary Oliver.
I wrote this paper a few years ago now in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges – but I’ve been returning to this ‘epistemology of wandering’ as evoked so wonderfully by Oliver’s poetic.
Ramble! Enjoy!
‘Drifting in the Weeds of Heaven: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of the Immeasurable’
Last week I did an inspiring workshop with Mark Tredinnick – a whole day dedicated to listening to, writing, thinking and talking about poetry. He introduced us to the form of the Sijo – a kind of Korean version of the haiku. I think I may have taken some liberties with the form, but here is another I wrote today.
Autumn Morning
You don’t
have to go far to feel the kindness of
the
Light to sit in a well of quiet sun beside the rosemary,
the
Crush of mown
grass, the heaviness of spent lavender nodding
as I pass.
Exciting news! Diane Fahey’s beautiful new collection of poetry, The Light Café, will be launched by Ross Gillett at the next Liquid Amber Poetry zoom, Thursday June 15, 7.30-9.30 AEST. Join us for another terrific night of ideas, poems, readings, door prize and open mics by registering here (free): https://liquidamberpress.com.au/events/
Thanks to Lucy Dougan for such a thoughtful review of my collection, This Shuttered Eye in the current issue of Westerly. See the Liquid Amber page for access to the review, some poetry readings and how to buy the book: https://liquidamberpress.com.au/2022/06/18/what-is-seen-and-what-is-not/
With a painter’s deft touch inseparable from an awareness that every brush stroke matters, Rose Lucas’s This Shuttered Eye is a masterclass in the use of telling detail. The eye in the title of the collection looks ‘into the texture of the seen’ (p. 13), seeking ‘deep shades’ and how these are in turn captured by the looker’s ‘shuttered’ gaze, creating a haze between the visible and the invisible. Here the eye is akin to a camera that reveals both studium and punctum in a picture [1]. But here the eye also unshutters the outer and inner worlds as these are filtered through experience and in the process of writing.