You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Mike Ladd’ tag.
I went to three sessions on my final day, starting with my second workshop, Embracing the unexpected, with Oz Hardwick.
Oz is from the UK and began by explaining how he prefers to write first thing in the morning without any voices, often short-lived as his wife puts the radio on. So Oz will be busy drafting then get distracted by a word or phrase, which formed the first of a series of exercises. Oz asked us to think about mirrors, be it a physical or metaphysical one, and as we wrote he threw out some words for us to include – head, marching, higher, war, student, ferret. We wrote about crows next, then had to personify them and have them engage with a phrase. It was interesting to hear the pieces shared and the different perspectives. I plan to develop my crow poem.
Making space for poetry
The panel for this session comprised Mike Ladd, Felicity Plunkett, Ross Donlon and Paul Munden, hosted by Jen Webb.
Mike I know from the Adelaide poetry scene, his work is fantastic, coupled with a commitment to sharing words in public spaces. Mike talked about Poetica, his radio program, which ran for 18 years to a mass audience due to its accessibility and the fact this medium is perfect for poetry being based on sound. Mike also shared a project he undertook with his partner, Cathy Brooks, to put poetry on street signs around the Adelaide bus station and spoke briefly about Raining Poetry, coordinated through Adelaide University, where poems are written on the sidewalk so they appear only when it rains.
Felicity works with students, as an editor through University of Queensland Press and a reviewer, adopting a variety of roles. Felicity’s student work involved harvesting words from the environment to prove you don’t have to dredge up words from inside, and shared some images of poetry on stones, in bottles, small forms to put out into the world for people to find. Felicity taught prose poetry to teachers and provided resources to help them deliver it back in the classroom, and spoke about gate-making rather than gate-keeping when it came to accessing literary opportunities, a phrase that stuck.
Ross started a poetry reading in Castlemaine, Victoria and attended an international arts festival every other year where literature wasn’t represented and so pulled together a poetry event, which sold out in days. Ross has also organised poetry readings in Carmen’s Tunnel lit using candelabras and arranged readings at Books Plus, which comprised a 20-minute session followed by questions and answers. Ross created Mark Time, a chapbook press each containing 32 pages, publishing a Shropshire-based poet whose work caught the eye of Carol Ann Duffy and was selected for inclusion in the Laureate anthology.
Paul put poetry and jazz events on as a student in bars, which escalated to integrating poetry in folk music in a daub and wattle venue in York, then onto creating a book of poetry and photos about Castle Howard. The British Council commissioned Paul to compile an anthology on climate change called Feeling the Pressure and Paul has written a poem called ‘Duet’ to mark the 100-year anniversary of the end of World War I to be read in Southwark Cathedral. The poem is based on a pair of handmade violins for Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon fashioned from a sycamore branch.
Questions and answers followed, sparking a discussion about how poetry should be paid for. It’s a craft and skill, honed over many years and yes, we do it for love, but this shouldn’t undermine the value of it. So it came as no surprise that poets are the lowest paid of all artists.
Poetry of the senses
My last session of the festival was a discussion between Moira Egan, Oz Hardwick, Ross Gibson and Monica Carroll, convened by Jordan Williams.
Moira is one of the international poets in residence based in Rome, and has smell and colour synesthesia. Moira read from her collection, which is split into halves – one on smell, referred to as her smelly sequence, and the other ekphrastic. Moira read ‘Poison’, about molluscs and purple followed by ‘Le Chambre Bleue’, literally about a blue room. Another poem featured Andy Warhol as “a skinny avatar of cool” and another about a ginger cat sitting on a beautiful piece of fabric.
Oz read from his collection, The House of Ghosts and Mirrors, and began by explaining that the cover image is the place in the room he was born where now stands a round mirror in a window. After his parents died, Oz’s poems became personal, demonstrated by ‘Archaeology’ about a crawl space in the family home. Oz spoke about a psychic geography, peeling back the layers of the house that haunts him, reading ‘Lacuna’ and ‘Emptying the cupboard’, which when he did he found a piece of the original lino.
Ross’s poetry is an aesthetic activity before it becomes semantic, sharing a quote by a Welsh poet about how poetry arrives through the intellect at the heart. Ross reads haiku, likening it to being hit on the head with a hammer, which releases a flood of associations. Ross shared a current project on show at a station in Sydney – a series of short phrases scroll as individual words on a 22-metre screen so that from a distance, it seems to sparkle as you try to decipher them, epitomising the city.
Monica talked about touch and poetry, getting us to close our eyes and touch one hand with the other while she read philosophical passages and explained how the object touched is the object touching. Monica then asked us to raise our hand and keep it aloft if we’d ever experienced an orgasm. I don’t believe any dropped. Monica asked us to keep it raised if we’d ever experienced a non-genital orgasm. The majority, including my own, fell, and she said she felt a shift in the room. It was an intriguing experiment.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the festival – made new connections, shared thoughts and ideas, learnt more about the art and of course, returned with more books! I’d highly recommend Poetry on the Move, it will satisfy every poetic curiosity. I wonder where next year will take me…
Adelaide’s Writers’ Week kicks off this Saturday with an impressive program full of all things literary, so there’ll be something for everyone.
Held in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, there’ll be a plethora of poets, novelists, playwrights, historians, biographers and memoirists, all genres to captivate and challenge the crowd. Notable events are; Mike Ladd chatting about his recent collection of poetry, Invisible Mending, published by Wakefield Press; an interview with Ken Bolton, ‘a laconic and discursive poet’, aswell as art critic, editor and publisher; and the coveted poetry readings presented by Peter Goldsworthy, with a stunning line-up.
Jan Owen and Cath Kenneally, stalwarts of the South Australian poetry scene, are joined by Steve Brock, Jules Leigh Koch, Louise Nicholas and Dominic Symes. Jules and Louise I know well and are incredibly talented poets; Jan I’m learning an invaluable amount from through her monthly workshops; Cath and Steve I’m still relatively new to their work; and Dominic I believe is an up and coming poet, one to watch.
Unfortunately, however, I’ll be en route to New Zealand to explore the South Island so will miss the entire week! Note to self for next time – avoid holidays in March.
is a must have collection. Published by Puncher and Wattmann and edited by Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave, this 658-page book anthologises Australian poetry for the last 25 years.
Taking 10 years to compile over 200 poets and 500 poems, it really is a landmark publication, a credit to the Australian poetry scene, and includes some incredible poets – Ken Bolton, Jennifer Compton, Peter Goldsworthy, Jill Jones, John Kinsella, Mike Ladd, David Malouf, David Mortimer, Les Murray, Jan Owen, Dorothy Porter, Mark Tredinnick, Fiona Wright, not to mention the editors themselves.
It’s being launched in Adelaide at the SA Writers Centre next Friday, which unfortunately I can’t make (off exploring Noosa), so I promptly ordered a copy. Flicking through for the first time, because this will need endless reads, two poems caught my eye – ‘Grief’ by Elizabeth Allen and ‘Snowflake’ by Anthony Lawrence.
Elizabeth is a Sydney-based poet and her chapbook Forgetful Hands is on my wish list. Hers is a powerfully poignant piece about her sister, who having lost her ‘Botticelli curls’
‘…has been looking into people like mirrors
but does not know how to make a face
that resembles the pain inside her.’
Anthony I saw at Mildura’s Writers’ Festival the year Sharon Olds headlined, who I was lucky enough to meet. His poem centres around his mother who cultivates a snowflake in the freezer ‘between the peas and the ice cream’, setting sapphires into her teeth:
‘At dinner I would pretend
to be a good son, and her smile
enameled the table
with points of dark blue light.’
This is a remarkable anthology, to be read, smiled, laughed, cried and absorbed between breaths, bit by brilliant bit.
Last night was the launch of the Southern-Land Spring series from Garron Publishing at the Halifax Café. And the place was bursting at the seams, with people flocking to hear the latest work from some fantastic poets – Mike Hopkins, Alison Flett, Steve Brock, Judy Dally and Louise McKenna.
MC’d by Gary MacRae from Garron Publishing with Sharon Kernot on book sales, which incidentally went like hot cakes, Mike Ladd introduced the line-up, another outstanding local poet.
First to read was Mike from his ingeniously titled Selfish Bastards and other poems, a collection described as a ‘parody of parodies’ and so naturally Mike read the title poem, which required audience participation. My favourite line has to be ‘Poets at poetry readings who go over time with their boring bloody confessional poems about their boring bloody tragic lives – Selfish Bastards!’ (shouted by the audience). Mike’s work is clever, witty and engaging, and there’s a very poignant poem in the collection called ‘My Father’s Blood’, which won a first prize at this year’s Salisbury Writers’ Festival.
Next up to the mic was Alison reading from Vessel and other poems, and again like Mike Alison read the title poem, two of its three stanzas, which I’ve heard Alison read before and just love. The poem is about a girl, with each stanza marking a different chapter in her life, beginning with ‘She is small. The sky does not yet come down around her. It is still contained in a blue strip at the top of the page’, epitomising childhood. Alison reads like a dream, fashions poems brimming with feeling and soul, which both haunt and enrapt with their quiet beauty.
After a short break, Judy shared some poems from Lost Property and other poems, a collection about her late father, her relationship with him and the impact it has on their family dynamics. Judy started with ‘My father on a January morning’, where we see him ‘hunched on the sea wall’, hiding, ignoring, clearly not wanting to be there, ending with ‘refused an ice cream, cast a shadow’. Judy’s poems belay the quite often heartbreak of parental relationships, lives spent, moments lost, asks the question, how did we come to this?
Steve read next from Jardin du Luxembourg and other poems, a collection about travel and his time spent in Europe. In Steve’s poem ‘Still Life’, he compares writing poetry to ‘a bowl of lemons’ where ‘you need the optimism of the lemon’ and ‘the ability to lend yourself like the humble lemon to season other parts of your life’. A clever thought-provoking piece, leaving us poets with a literally tantalizing image – that ‘one day you have enough lemons to live off alone.’
To finish the set Louise read from The Martyrdom of Bees and other poems, which draws on her nursing career. Louise also started with the title poem and like Alison read two of its three stanzas, where a bee ‘alights upon his arm, testing for sweetness on the inside of it, as if it is the pale throat of a flower before the white hot pain’ and then later, they become ‘airborne tigresses, poised to kill.’ I particularly liked ‘A Nurse’s Meditations in the Sluice Room’, where ‘ your contempt is like a needle waved in my face’ to the final stunning lines – ‘I have carried my anger in your bedpan – now I open the tap, rinse it away.’
These chapbooks are exquisitely rendered pieces of art, both inside and out, and once again provide perfect poetic snapshots, a credit to the South Australian poetry scene.
I was invited to the launch by Rachael Mead of Mike Ladd’s new book from Wakefield Press, Invisible Mending. It was held at the publishers down a pretty street in Mile End in what’s known fondly as ‘The Laneway’. I’d never been there so was eager to look around, buy some books and of course, learn about Mike’s new work.
Michael Bollen, who runs the local press, MC’d the event inviting Rachael up who did, as always, an exquisite introduction of Mike’s new book. Rachael referred to Mike as ‘loved and lauded’, stating this was his 9th book with his first collection being published at the tender age of 25 called The crack in the crib part of the Friendly Street Poets series. Rachael explained how this new collection draws many of Mike’s past threads together in a series of non-fiction pieces, a combination of poetry, prose and photos, saying ‘it’s not easy, this being human’. What I love about Rachael is her ability to really connect with the material she’s launching (having experienced this firsthand!) and to share new insights into the poet’s work.
Mike only read three pieces, beginning with a request, ‘Learn to Speak the Language’, which he recited from memory. This was a humorous piece, an answer to a question posed by a young man Mike encountered on a bus who, on overhearing ‘two women chatting in Punjabi’, states ‘If you come to this country / you should learn to speak the language.’ And so off goes Mike starting with ‘Yeah. You’re right…So how’s your Kaurna?’ (the native language of the Adelaide Plains and one of 150 Indigenous languages still spoken today) before reeling off a number of other Indigenous languages the young guy should try. This was a striking way to highlight ignorance, for Australia, its heritage and culture, and quite rightly received a round of applause.
Mike then shared a poem called ‘Adelaide’, a wonderful finite description of the city, a promotion of sorts – ‘We always have to talk you up, / get your festival clothes on’, ‘I like you best in November / when you spill buckets of jacaranda’ and when it rains after our infamous heat there are ‘chuckles in the gutter / and applause from the rooftops’. My favourite part is where Mike describes the city view from Windy Point (which I discovered only for the first time recently for my birthday dinner) where ‘It’s better up here than Los Angeles, / that hot glitter, all the way to the Gulf’, just gorgeous.
Mike finished with prose, ‘A Country Wedding’, the last piece in the book and one that contains the title. Here we find Mike in Queensland for his nephew’s wedding ‘Now a two-hour flight, it was once a three-day journey, when the children were small.’ The mobile phone plays a significant part, where Mike tries to justify his absence of one – ‘I am not the only one on the planet without a mobile phone’. What stands out for me here is Mike’s sense of place when describing the creek where ‘An hour before, the groom was getting his hair cut…holding a smoke and a cup of tea, like a last man’s wish.’ This is the image I was left with – ‘The she-oaks still look ravaged, as if attacked by blunt axes. But the firetail finches have returned, and the rainbow bee-eaters. There is invisible mending here all around me.’
This is an outstanding book, rich in every way, from it’s sometimes poignant subject matter, in particular Mike’s pieces on his father, to the mediums they’re expressed in. And the cover image was also there in the flesh, literally, a painstaking embroidery of a thumbprint by his multidisciplinary artist partner, Cathy Brooks, which I believe went up for sale after. So I will end by saying this – hats off to you Mike for another stunning collection, every page holds treasure.
Amelia Walker and Mike Ladd were this month’s featured poets hosted by Friendly Street at the Halifax Café, two fantastic local poets who I thought complimented each other very well.
Introduced by the lovely Jelena Dinic, Amelia was first up, but not before distributing a piece of paper to each table with a request to write down five things (in our case, five abstract nouns). Amelia actually started with a poem by someone else, something she often does apparently, and it just happened to be one of Kathryn Hummel’s who has recently returned from India where she published her second collection, The Bangalore Set. The poem focused on winded birds whose ‘feathered tips articulate their shock’, a vivid image.
Amelia had her first collection published at the tender age of 19, Fat Streets and Lots of Squares, essentially about Adelaide which has proved very popular with teachers in schools. Amelia shared ‘Him’ from the collection about a well-known local character who walked up and down Rundle Mall in white gum boots, referring to him as ‘an isolated hiccup’ and she ‘had heard from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, he does it for a laugh’. Amelia then read an updated version written now at the age of 32 called ‘For Johnny’, where he is ‘real like fairies’ with a ‘body dressed in loud undress’, a far more introspective piece that asked questions, culminating in the memorable line of ‘a made in China koala always monkeying your back’. This was followed by another new poem about an old poem inspired by the war memorial on North Terrace, which spoke of looking after soldiers in a nursing home, ‘with brushed teeth and perfect parts’ these were ‘old men unhinged from time’.
Amelia then collected the paper from the tables, put them in order and created a poem before our eyes. Beginning with our abstract nouns, for example ‘homesickness’, she connected each with a colour, an animal, a place and a time, producing some very thought-provoking lines. This was clever stuff and further enhanced the fact Amelia is an amazing performance poet who captivates her audience.
Mike read old work, from his second, third and fourth collections, which is what these readings are about, the antithesis to the Lee Marvin ones. Mike started with a poem called ‘Vasectomy’ where the doctor ‘chattered golf, his slice and splice, tapping the balls in’ which his, after, swelled to resemble ‘a witch’s fruit’ culminating in the poignant image of ‘me on the cliff top with empty arms’. Mike’s next piece was a ‘Poem for two brickies’ who threw bricks to the other with movement reminiscent of some kind of dance as they ‘placed to weight on an invisible shelf of air’. ‘Waiting room’ was just that, where the walls were ‘duck-egg blue’ and a girl was ‘scratching her name with a 20 cent bit’. Mike then shared four poems in one about water, which ‘has no voice tonight’, where ‘water cats’ loitered and resembled Siamese from whom you could ‘drink their eyes’.
Mike had written some semi-surrealist poems about objects inspired by a surrealist artist whose name I didn’t quite catch, one being ‘Dreams of a pillow’ in which the pillow imagines being ‘hard and sharp’, and another simply called ‘Spare chair’ which plays ‘wooden horse in secret’. Mike moved onto more naturalistic pieces – ‘Murray bend’ where ‘sand fire colours warm the eye’ in a ‘big fish dreaming place’, and ‘Parable of a farmer’ written in long lines to symbolise those made by cattle traversing a field so that ‘shambling cows turned hills into verse’. ‘Spinal unit’ Mike wrote after his partner fractured her spine, where ‘beds are altars for flowers’ and ‘patients brace for their separate nights’.
Mike finished with some beautiful snippets about vegetables in ‘A vegetative life’ – beetroot, asparagus, potato and parsnip, the ‘pale digits of the damned’, and red onion that he told ‘you contain infinity and make me weep’. Mike was just as engaging as Amelia, no doubt honed from his years hosting ABC’s radio program Poetica. This was a brilliant line up.
I haven’t had much time recently to focus on writing but seeing the Lee Marvin line up for Tuesday at the Dark Horsey Bookshop – Mike Ladd, Alison Flett, Jelena Dinic and Peter Goldsworthy – my priorities quickly changed.
Mike read more from his Dream Tetra series, developed using phrases he remembers from his dreams, which he then inputs into Google to see what it generates. Mike began with ‘Dream Tetra No.4’ centered around the line ‘the crack in the crib’ and featured a priest as ‘a black-cloaked grandfather’. He then followed with ‘Dream Tetra No.8’ preceded with an apology to any German speakers in the audience and then described his mum who is ‘alive today in her aloneness’, a beautifully poignant statement. ‘Dream Tetra No.10’ explored the concept of emoticons and how it would be wonderful if we could plug our heads into a machine to show our current emoticon, an interesting idea.
Alison was up next to share what she described an experimental set, which is exactly what these readings are about. Alison has recently been awarded a writers grants from Arts SA and is using this to develop a collection about home and belonging, and the connection to land. Her poem ‘The map of belonging’ explored the sense of being lost, ‘finding yourself landless’ and asked thought-provoking questions like ‘where do your belongings come from?’ ending with ‘the hulls of boats will always be filled with bodies’, a haunting image. Alison’s next poem, ‘Colour difference’ compared the Australian yellow to the British yellow an interesting comparison culminating in a buttercup. ‘Five ways to dream a country’ was a five part series with ‘bare feet ticking on bare floorboards’, followed by ‘Songs of the outback’ featuring road kill and distance, making even the horrendous sound stunning.
Jelena began by explaining how, being from Serbia, English is her second language, and that she wanted to be a doctor but no, her parents insisted she be a poet! Jelena’s first poem was simply called ‘Back’ and indeed was about going back home, what she saw and felt, quickly followed by ‘Hotel room nightmare’ featuring ‘illusions of faces in places’. ‘Gypsy travels’ opened with the line ‘her golden feet lost in direction’ and continued the vivid imagery with ‘a caravan of wishes’. In Jelena’s next poem, ‘Skin-kissed’, she shared her experience of dealing with psoriasis, a debilitating skin condition causing her to spend time ‘scrubbing and scrubbing her mermaid body’. ‘Duck’ Jelena read first in Serbian and then provided a translation, where the duck ‘carries the restlessness of water’.
Peter book-ended the session by reading excerpts from a novel he’s been writing for 3-4 years and which, he confessed, he has been annoying his partner with. Before however, Peter read from part of a series which posed that age-old question is there a god and described how ‘church bells sing in the far blue itching’, evoking an almost traditional country scene. Turning to his draft novel, Peter shared a section about a blind cop returning home from hospital following an “accidental” overdose, but not before collecting his dog from the dog’s home. With lines like ‘soft eggs of the eyes’, ‘half a packet past nine’, ‘the nib whispered across the pad’ and how an underlying growing anger causes ‘a volley of barks’, this was atmospheric gritty stuff, which I look forward to being published.
The launch of the Spring 2015 series of Southern-Land Poets from Garron Publishing took place last night at the Halifax Café. These are exquisite chapbooks from some big names – Rob Walker, Jelena Dinic, Aidan Coleman, Rachael Mead and David Ades – each a beautifully presented snapshot of their work.
Gary McRae, founder of Garron Publishing, hosted the event and began by thanking Sharon Kernot, assistant at the independent press and a writer herself (and who also did a wonderful job of selling the chapbooks) for her meticulous work and commitment, and then Michael Bollen of Wakefield Press for his continued support of the series.
So first up was Rob Walker reading from Polices & Procedures.
Now working in HR, I can so relate to this title and was looking forward to Rob sharing some of its poems. He began with the title poem, a short piece about hindsight in his teaching career, followed by ‘A drive to work’ ‘on a day when every dewdrop traps a rainbow’, a gorgeous image. ‘Time of your life’ was next, which captured the heady days of youth and then a few poems relating to Rob’s period of bad health, ‘Resolution / D-generation’, ‘Radiology’, and ‘Coming off the tramadol’, with some haunting lines; ‘I am an imperfect copy of myself’, ‘internal astrology’ and ‘racing through a black espresso night’, taking us to where he has been and come back from
Next up was the lovely Jelena Dinic with her chapbook Buttons on my Dress.
Jelena began with ‘The Last Summer’, a wonderful poem about growing up with memories of ‘before’ ending with the stunning line ‘I learn to drink from the bottle and nothing tastes the same’. Her next poem ‘Crossing borders’ alluded to a time of discontent in former Yugoslavia from where she hails, by addressing a mother about her’ three sons the most wanted’ and how to keep them safe. Having studied art history as part of my degree I loved Jelena’s ‘Portrait of Olympia the Prostitute’ and once again could picture the ‘unattainable stretching herself like history resilient to the centuries’, an elegant comparison. I’ve never heard Jelena read before; she was captivating.
Aidan Coleman was up next just before the break reading from Cartoon Snow.
Like Rob, Aidan opened with the title poem, which gave us an almost magical frozen land ‘where a blue night is snowing to itself, shushing the owl-wide forest’. The next two I recognised from Aidan’s Lee Marvin reading – ‘Primary’ and ‘Barbarian Studies’ – in the first ‘the teacher chastens gently in lowercase green’ and in the second, ‘kids jostle, shove and swing like wrecking balls’. Aidan finished his set with ‘Ham Radio’, a poem about his father working ‘the difficult braille of a circuit board’…‘until a voice comes clean of static, to talk in a clear bubble’.
Then we had a break where I noted some faces in the crowd – Mike Ladd, Peter Goldsworthy, Louise Nicholas, Jill Jones, Jennifer Liston, Jules Leigh Koch, David Mortimer, Mike Hopkins, Martin Christmas – and a crowd it was, the place was packed.
Rachael, closely photographed by doting husband Andrew Noble, who has just finished building her a writer’s cottage (yes you read that right, I want one!), read from The Quiet Blue World.
Rachael shared a poem she hadn’t before called ‘White Blues’ about seeing Jack White at Federation Hall a few years ago. This longer piece was loaded with incredible imagery before the concert – ‘In Chinatown, customers with chopsticks lean over steaming bowls like fine-beaked birds dipping into sweet cups of magnolia’, a ‘man’s face is a crumpled tissue of experience’ – and then once inside, they are ‘driven to use (their) bodies as instruments as (they) open up’. Rachael’s last poem, ‘What the fire didn’t touch’, was about her parent’s house in a bush fire, beginning with ‘Mum, who was never late a day in her life, woke up early for her death and missed it’ to the stunning last line of finding her childhood books with ‘the years waiting like pressed flowers between the pages’.
David Ades, skyping in from Pittsburgh at 4:30 in the morning (now that’s dedication!), completed the line-up by reading from his chapbook Only the Questions are Eternal.
David also shared the title poem from his collection, which compared the relentlessness of questions to baby birds ‘chirruping in their nests, pointed beaks raised upwards, insistent’. His next poem, ‘The bridge I must walk across’ was very apt considering the ongoing refugee crisis, culminating in the provocative stanza ‘I am becoming a stranger inside my own skin, my children becoming the bridge I must walk across’. David’s final poem, ‘A father’s call’ stems from becoming a dad unexpectedly, and describes how over the years he searched for his yet-to-be-born children – ‘I flung my call at your absence’ – a very touching piece.
And so the new series had been well and truly launched in what will be a memorable evening, and with the chapbooks retailing at a mere $7 each, I felt it only right to complete my set (adding to Rachael’s and Rob’s), because they really are an amazing read.
What a wonderful title for a collection of poetry! Penned by Jules Leigh Koch, I went along to the launch of it yesterday evening at the SA Writer’s Centre.
This the fourth collection of poetry from Jules, a long awaited one by all accounts that took several years to write before being published by Interactive Press based in Queensland, as this talented poet doesn’t release poems into the world lightly (and believe me, they are well worth the wait!). The event was MC’d by none other than Rachael Mead, who did a beautiful job of introducing Mike Ladd, another fantastic local poet, to officially launch the new book.
Mike described Jules as a man of metaphor, quoting a few brilliant examples – ‘the blood clot of sunset’, ‘the artificial lake is as calm as a sedative’, ‘a construction site is shoveled in with shadows’ – and there is even a poem in the collection to cement this fact, ‘After Love-making I Think in Metaphors’. Mike read a piece called ‘Funeral Flowers’, which having read it again I think may have a few connotations, alluding to love, sex, illness and death. Mike also echoed something Rachael had said – that no one writes the moon, rain and sky like Jules does, and it’s these gorgeous images running through the poems that make them so appealing.
Jules started off by thanking Robert Rath for the cover image, who is an amazing photographer and was there helping to snap the launch. Jules then read several poems including ‘Rachel’s Insomnia’, where ‘her eyes are unpicking the moon from its black canvas’ and ‘her every moment is a vase on the edge of a shelf’. In ‘On My Third Attempt at Leaving Her’ ‘the morning is unpacking itself as shadows are being swept beneath furniture’ and in one of my particular favourites, ‘The Ropes and Pulleys’, ‘sunlight has torn itself along my bedroom wall with the same single-mindedness as a ladder runs down a woman’s stocking’.
These are just a few of the striking images between the covers. I could go on but I won’t, because I strongly urge you to buy a copy – this is a stunning collection that will haunt you for days.
Now, I apologise in advance. This should be a review of the Lee Marvin readings on Tuesday. It is not. It’s mainly about me.
Keeping me company on the bill was Ken Bolton, host of the evening, Matt Hooton and Heather Taylor Johnson. Ken was up first to read two poems. I should say what they were about and had planned to make my usual notes but alas, found it difficult to concentrate (sorry Ken!). Next up was Matt who read a piece of prose after setting the scene of being invited to look at a patch of ancient dirt (that much I remember and it really doesn’t do Matt’s work any justice, useless I am!). And then there was me.
There were some big names in the crowd – my usual gang of Rachael Mead, Mike Hopkins, Alison Flett and Heather, and then Peter Goldsworthy, Shannon Burns, Mike Ladd and David Mortimer, one of whom told me beforehand they had come especially to hear me read so you know, no pressure. And just like my launch, initially a bit nervous in the lead up but once up there, calm. Strange. I read 7 poems, two of which I had read at the launch, managed to get a few laughs in the right places and left the audience with thoughtful faces. Result. All after finding out that two of my poems had been published in the new Friendly Street Poets Anthology launched earlier in the evening at another venue, which was a real surprise and something I knew nothing about, one of which had been shortlisted by Mike Ladd for the Satura Prize (the best poem in the anthology) and then also discovered I’ve been shortlisted in the mindshare poetry awards, the winners of which will read at the Festival of Now in October. So you could say my head was pretty spaced out, helped/hindered by the two glasses of wine I had had. But again, apparently, I did good. And again, really enjoyed it. This may become a habit. Why I’m writing in short sentences I don’t know. Maybe I’m still slightly stunned.
Now Heather’s set I remember (yay!) because I could relax. Heather read two pieces of prose with a focus on her mother so emotive stuff, followed by a poem in three parts about coping with Meniere’s disease, a condition Heather herself suffers with which she projected onto Graham, the protagonist in her brilliant debut novel Pursuing Love and Death published by Harper Collins. The poem was beautifully poignant brimming with sea imagery, with lines like ‘and with a body craving salt you are full of ocean’ to convey the debilitating giddiness associated with the disease. I have no doubt this will feature in The Fractured Self Anthology Heather is currently pulling together.
So you know, back to me. I managed to sell some more copies of my chapbook, with requests to sign from above famous poets(!) and left the Dark Horsey Bookshop stocked with a few aswell. Definitely another night to remember – what a blast!
J V Birch 