The Best Australian Poems 2016 Read online

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Sarah Holland-Batt and Black Inc. 2016

  Sarah Holland-Batt asserts her moral rights in the collection.

  Individual poems © retained by the authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  ISBN: 9781863958875 (pbk)

  ISBN: 9781925435351 (ebook)

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Typesetting by Tristan Main

  Contents

  Sarah Holland-Batt

  Introduction

  * * *

  Martin Harrison

  Patio

  Robert Adamson

  Black Winged Stilts

  Adam Aitken

  In The Billy Sing Baghdad Bar-and-Grill

  Jordie Albiston

  Chris Andrews

  Advanced Souvlaki

  Evelyn Araluen

  Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal

  Judith Beveridge

  A Panegyric for Toads

  Ken Bolton

  Dark Heart

  Peter Boyle

  Discovered in a rock pool

  Michael Brennan

  There and Then

  Lisa Brockwell

  Waiting on Imran Khan

  David Brooks

  The Pig

  Kevin Brophy

  Siren

  Lachlan Brown

  Suspended Belief

  Pam Brown

  Rooibos

  Joanne Burns

  bound

  Michelle Cahill

  Car Lover

  Elizabeth Campbell

  Cloaca Maxima

  Bonny Cassidy

  Axe derby

  Julie Chevalier

  Plan B

  Eileen Chong

  Magnolia

  Aidan Coleman

  Secondary

  Stuart Cooke

  Hinterland

  MTC Cronin

  ABOVE US

  Nathan Curnow

  Swimming (my lane)

  Luke Davies

  Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield

  Sarah Day

  Wooden Horse

  Joel Deane

  Following the many elbows of the Yarra

  Jelena Dinic

  The Silence of Siskins

  Dan Disney

  untitled: villaknelle xvi

  Lucy Dougan

  Right Through Me

  Laurie Duggan

  A northern winter

  Ali Cobby Eckermann

  Black Deaths in Custody

  Stephen Edgar

  Hearts and Minds

  Anne Elvey

  working from home – to do list

  Michael Farrell

  Death of a Year

  Liam Ferney

  Requiem

  Toby Fitch

  Janus

  Lionel G. Fogarty

  Ambition Man

  Tina Giannoukos

  XXXI

  Lisa Gorton

  from Empirical

  Robert Gray

  The Latter Days

  Phillip Hall

  Royalty

  Natalie Harkin

  Cultural Precinct

  Dennis Haskell

  Tinnitus

  Dominique Hecq

  Archive Fever

  Paul Hetherington

  Black Dress

  Fiona Hile

  Relocation of the Big Prawn

  LK Holt

  Modern Woman Sonnets

  Andy Jackson

  The change room

  Lisa Jacobson

  The Jews of Hamburg Speak Out

  Clive James

  Plot Points

  Virginia Jealous

  First contact, Kakadu

  A. Frances Johnson

  Diary of an Anti-elegist

  Jill Jones

  In Flight Entertainment

  Kit Kelen

  takk for alt

  Cate Kennedy

  Limbo

  John Kinsella

  Spatial Realignment of Jam Tree Gully

  Andy Kissane

  Getting away with it

  Shari Kocher

  Foxstruck

  Simeon Kronenberg

  Bringing It All Back Home

  Verity Laughton

  Kangarilla, Summer, 2016

  Anthony Lawrence

  Wax Cathedral

  Bronwyn Lea

  Blow Job (kama sutra)

  Emma Lew

  Poem

  Kate Lilley

  Lovestore

  Debbie Lim

  A House in Switzerland

  Kate Llewellyn

  Possibly

  Cameron Lowe

  Pastoral / ‘Asset management’

  Jennifer Maiden

  Orchards

  Caitlin Maling

  Intimacy

  David Malouf

  Visitation on Myrtle Street

  David McCooey

  Invisible Cities

  Kate Middleton

  Study of a Lion

  Peter Minter

  Craft

  Les Murray

  Nuclear Family Bees

  π.o.

  Shakespeare & the State Library

  Ella O’Keefe

  Letter from the swimming pool

  Meredi Ortega

  Cyborg me

  Geoff Page

  Ekphrasis

  Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella

  from Hawes — God’s Intruder

  Felicity Plunkett

  ‘A Decidedly Pathological Process:

  Claire Potter

  Weeping Foxes

  Hessom Razavi

  Shabnam Nightwish

  Peter Rose

  The Subject of Feeling

  Robyn Rowland

  Night Watch

  Gig Ryan

  Astronomical Twilight

  Tracy Ryan

  Smartraveller

  Omar Sakr

  ghosting the ghetto

  Jaya Savige

  Hossegor

  Thomas Shapcott

  The body

  Alex Skovron

  Around the World

  Maria Takolander

  Argument

  Tim Thorne

  Jakhan Pollyeva

  John Tranter

  Young Folly

  Ellen Van Neerven

  Invisible Spears

  Ann Vickery

  An Object exists only as it might exist to Another

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  Altogether Elsewhere

  Simon West

  A Plein-Air Artist Reflects on Timing

  Petra White

  On This

  Jessica L. Wilkinson

  FAUNE et JEUX

  Fiona Wright

  Poppies, Katoomba

  Ouyang Yu

  Self Publishing

  Fay Zwicky

  Boat Song

  Billy Marshall Stoneking

  One Last Poem

  Publication Details

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  ‘I SEE THE POET AS A SEISMOGRAPH OF THE AGE’S DARKER regions,’ Fay Zwicky wrote in a
recently published extract of her journals.* ‘Living out fifty years of this dreadful century has certainly made the needle twitch without stopping.’ I have turned Zwicky’s enigmatic, quaking metaphor of the seismograph over in my mind since I read it; in it, I recognise two ideas. The first is that while the poet does not leap at every cataclysmic event or operate as some kind of geopolitical tuning fork, she often responds powerfully to the dark events and anxieties of the age. Poetry is not written in a vacuum: it is of its time, and it responds to the conditions of its time – whether earnestly or satirically, directly or aslant. And, like a seismograph, the poet often registers the uneasy vibrations of a culture before the repercussions are felt by the body politic – a dangerous prescience that goes some way toward explaining why poets are persecuted by authoritarian regimes the world over.

  But Zwicky’s metaphor also speaks more broadly to poetry’s curious relationship to time. As a form, poetry is paradoxically both fleeting and ephemeral, yet remarkably durable. It is able to respond nimbly to its subject matter, at lightning speed – yet last, at its best, for millennia afterwards. It inhabits the language of the hour, and often of the minute; we see this in its swift and often parodic adoption of neologisms, its linguistic dexterity and adaptability, its unceasing and energetic reinvention – yet its readers enjoy decoding it centuries later. The poet, like the seismograph, skitters over the peaks and troughs of a lifetime, but the poem itself is a series of aftershocks realised through generations of readers who follow.

  This durability is precisely because the poem detonates in the instant of its reading. Its utterances come into being just as we vault each enjambment; its silences and spaces are conjured up in the moment we encounter them; its meaning is arrived upon through the jouissance and play of reading. Above all, poetry – for both its readers and its writers – is a form that demands attentiveness and active intelligence. It treats language as a volatile and charged commodity, and one whose subtleties and nuances are worth puzzling over. As Valéry defined it, poetry is ‘a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language’. In the context of our increasingly corrosive political discourse and the fuzzy ‘truthiness’ that pervades it, poetry seems to me a radical form, and reading it a radical act.

  Reading the past year’s poetry with a view to editing this anthology was a different species of reading than I am used to – full of the usual exhilarating jolts of delight and surprise, but accompanied by an unusual anxiety. I found myself charmed and elated by some poems one day, but then a little cool on them the next; they looked different in one light than they did in another. I wanted to be sure of the poems, but found myself returning to a favourite Michael Dransfield poem more than once, with renewed understanding:

  i’m not dead

  sure of the poems

  life seems

  to suffer a bit

  in the translation

  Like Dransfield, I was ‘not dead / sure of the poems’. I circled back, re-reading and re-reading, feeling like a forensic scientist must: on the hunt for proof, for certainty. I reminded myself that reading poetry – and the joy of a particular poem – is a sort of alchemy; at the risk of sounding mystical, there are aspects to the reading experience that seem mercurial, quixotic, dependent on some unpredictable internal weather. Some days, the poem’s electric power, its frisson, can ‘suffer a bit / in the translation’.

  So I re-read, patiently – obsessively is probably the more accurate adverb – and slowly a magnetic group of poems emerged that I found myself returning to, over and over again. Their shocks, to paraphrase a line from a superb Lucy Dougan poem included in this selection, went right through me. I turned them to the light many times, probing their facets; they emerged from this process adamantine. Lines from each of them are now lodged permanently in my mind, and I am as sure of these poems as I am of anything.

  I aimed to capture a diverse cross section of the poetry being written in Australia at present and to include the work of new poets wherever I could, but above all I paid attention to the individual poems themselves, privileging those that seemed most urgent, startling, stylish, ingenious, defiant, alive. My selection gestures towards the formal and thematic variety and brilliant inventiveness of our poets, but is a beginning rather than an end point in that respect. Overall, I was struck by the sheer volume of extraordinary poems being published in Australia, the dynamism and range of our poets. I was also struck by the dedication of our poetry editors and anthologists. If, as Dransfield once wrote, ‘to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment’, then the work of poetry editors and publishers verges on zealotry of the best sort.

  There are several projects and anthologies that stood out over my past year of reading that are worth remarking on; I hope readers of this anthology will seek them out. Australian Book Review introduced a new initiative with States of Poetry – a significant new annual anthology drawing attention to the geographic distribution and localities of our poets. Dan Disney and Kit Kelen co-edited Writing to the Wire, a remarkable and urgent anthology centred on refugee and asylum seeker issues. Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson co-edited the recently published Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry – a fantastically rich and diverse collection that introduced me to several emerging poets I have included here. And Kate Fagan and Ann Vickery co-edited the excellent Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry, a significant anthology collecting poets committed to decolonisation, ecopoetics, cultural unsettlement, and other forms of transformational poetics.

  One of the great pleasures of Australian poetry is its quality of sprawl, to borrow Les Murray’s phrase. The poems collected here sprawl geographically – from the ‘pimple amongst the wildflowers’ of the colonial township at Mullewa in Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s eclogue with John Kinsella, to the catfish hole at Jayipa in Phillip Hall’s ‘Royalty’ and the crustacean effigy at Ballina in Fiona Hile’s ‘Relocation of the Big Prawn’. In a country where even the names of so many of our literary journals signal towards geographical orientation or locality – Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, Island, Westerly – it is perhaps unsurprising that many of these poems contend with place. But their sprawl extends beyond national borders, and is wholly cosmopolitan, veering to the glacial tip of South America in Maria Takolander’s ‘Argument’, a Norwegian graveyard in Kit Kelen’s ‘takk for alt,’ a Guangzhou wet market in Lachlan Brown’s ‘Suspended Belief’, Biscayan and Tahitian surf breaks in Jaya Savige’s ‘Hossegor’, and Rome’s ancient sewerage system in Elizabeth Campbell’s ‘Cloaca Maxima’. The worldliness and urbanity of these peripatetic poems will surely strike readers as a refreshing palate cleanser from the parochialism, tribalism and nativism dominating much of our political discourse at present.

  Beyond their terrestrial ambulations, the poems in this year’s anthology also sprawl across a dazzlingly diverse range of subjects and aesthetics. There are poems that tremor with the anxieties of the war on terror, with the seismic shifts of Brexit and the promise of Grexit, poems that reverberate with social and cultural discontent and unsettlement. There are poems that probe news events frequently shrouded by cultural amnesia – from Ali Cobby Eckermann’s indelible ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ to Michelle Cahill’s ‘Car Lover’, a haunting address to those who assault and murder women. There are poems centred on the body – its precariousness, its sensuality, its limitations and mortality – and poems about the often disturbing advances in biotechnology. There are poems sketching the relationship between the human and natural worlds that fizz with a particularly muscular Australian vernacular – Les Murray’s native bees as evicted smallholders ‘with their new life to rebuild, / new eggs, new sugarbag, // gold skinfulls of water’, or Judith Beveridge’s corpulent toads ‘bull[ing] their way across earth’. There are poems interrogating the nexus between language, place, and belonging, stretching from those charting migrant experiences in our capital cities, such as Omar Sakr’s ‘ghosting the ghetto’ a
nd π.o.’s ‘Shakespeare & the State Library’, to the memorable ‘Learning Buandjalung on Tharawal’ by Evelyn Araluen – a powerful account of the continuous cultural knowledge embedded in language and Country.

  One of the most likeable aspects of contemporary Australian poetry is that it is profane as often as it is sacred; there is a rich vein of irony and satire that runs through our poetics, a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere. This enduring quality is evident in many of the poems collected here, including brilliant contributions by Pam Brown, John Tranter, Ken Bolton, Ouyang Yu, Jill Jones and Tim Thorne. There are poems that respond ekphrastically to other art forms, from Jessica L. Wilkinson’s ‘FAUNE et JEUX’ to Bronwyn Lea’s playful encounter with the kitsch porn aesthetics of pop art superstar Jeff Koons, and those that speak to the act of writing itself, such as Robert Adamson’s intertextual ‘Black Winged Stilts’, with its Stevensian ‘mangrove tree at the end of the mind’, or Andy Kissane’s sardonic take on recent plagiarism scandals in ‘Getting away with it’. Overall, I suspect my selection skews slightly darker in tone than some previous years; this perhaps speaks to the fact that the past year has felt a particularly vertiginous one. These poems speak in and of unsettling times; in the maelstrom, they shudder and catch.