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 cell

The white gaze of light a suite of poems from Finland

Walking into History from the Kinchega suite mp3

From Wessex Archeology mp3

Nile Songs

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