Poems - a brief introduction
I write all kinds of poetry, diversity is a key instinct - from haiku to long documentary epics (Antarctica 200 pages, some of which I transformed into a radio play, broadcast on the ABC a number of years ago).
I have begun expanding discursive poems, mixing poetry with other genres, media (incl. video) and discourses, but I also write occasional poems for friends, marriages, and yes funerals etc. momentary events in a life.
Some poems as mp3s are found in other parts of the site, for example, Rhubarb & Pearls.
'Heathrow', Aug 2011, with images
'Real Love' - 2010 Newcastle anthology - extract. The poem is about death but I'd term it as an eco-love poem.
Kitchen Music - extractc Bundanon with William Barton, winner David Tribe Award, Oct 08
Play (MP3) Cockatoos, Cooks River, Sept 08
Summertime Blues Boxing Day 2008
Groundwork from the 2008 Newcastle anthology (To sculpt the moment)- the poem is part of a long sequence from a 3 day visit to Adelaide during Writers Week - here are 2 extracts, one about the Ngurrara canvas that made history as the first time art was used as evidence in a Federal Court case, the other about a work by the late Aboriginal artist, Michael Riley..
Toreigh Island, poem from Ireland
Driving to the Island about Bobby Sands, subject of Steve McQueen's brilliant new film 'Hunger'
The white gaze of light a suite of poems from Finland
Walking into History from the Kinchega suite mp3
From Wessex Archeology mp3
Ground Work (extract
Wednesday March 5, Adelaide
[pub. Newcastle anthology to sculpt the moment, 2008]
Retrieving Country
Government thinks this is empty country; it is not empty country.
Jimmy Pike
A year before I was born men went to Ngurrara country
and brought back vocabularies, photographs, field notes
and maps, over a hundred maps - the walls are moving
with their marks travelling over sheets of brown paper.
They drew the mysteries of Spinifex, perentie
and soak holes, and dispersed names scrawled like trees
across the Great Sandy Desert which cartographers
from any angle had imagined a great emptiness.
A canvas recoups this landscape inscribed with over
a thousand sites, so vast it slopes to the floor
besieged by display and explanation. Monitors unfurl
elders cross-legged or crouched mashing art
with the profile of water, precedence of myth
history of waterholes and the prevalence of music,
the rhythm singing the real work with intensity
reddening red quandong ripe, song singing
to paint the painting’s syntax of past present since paint
ties skin to sand to story enmeshed in desert mosaic,
the silhouettes of hare-wallabies and desert bandicoots
not waking from dream into its presence.
Paliyarra the law giver emerged from a whirlpool travelled
to country with sacred objects (paly parra ) and stories,
the pulp and pith of breath and pips of song are folded
and unfolded. Folk art trees row into totemic signs
upending hierarchies of art with Lava Laval spreadeagled,
dead he turned into a snake and returned to jila kurtal,
some say he’s on the pension, but I can see tracks
to his waterhole. On the edge elders cry, others walk the
country
and point to songs with sticks, one teaching a child beats a
circle blue.
Returning after many years, another walks by water so happy
country is wet that he cries and would sleep on the meniscus,
key witnesses before a table set with black cloth,
‘The Federal Court of Australia’ embossed in gold. Dogs
wander,
old women squeeze stones and paint the bloody ooze of ochre
onto kids in readiness for corroboree, a crowd of lawyers
and media watch dancers swirl below a wondrous mackerel sky.
Walking through the Karlijita ranges,
I saw the hills moving.
Kurtal Song
Poems