The Best Australian Poems 2016 Read online

  The anthology this year opens with an emblematic poem by the late poet Martin Harrison, ‘Patio’, from his stunning last book, Happiness: just as the patio itself serves as entryway to the house, so Harrison’s poem is the entry point to the past year’s poems. As well as being one of our finest poets, scholars and environmentalists, Harrison was an indefatigable mentor and teacher to many of the poets in this anthology, and I encourage those readers and admirers of his work to seek out the edition of Plumwood Mountain, guest edited by Stuart Cooke and Peter Minter, dedicated to his memory. ‘Patio’ is, among other things, an entreaty to remember our capacity for wonder in the face of so much darkness – a fitting inclusion from a poet who brought wonder and delight to so many of his readers and fellow writers.

  Bookending the collection this year is an arresting last poem by Billy Marshall Stoneking, another generous mentor and vital member of the Australian poetry community, who passed away during the parentheses of this anthology’s timeframe. Stoneking was a poet, playwright, scriptwriter and producer who had a keen interest in Indigenous issues since he first arrived in Australia in the 1970s, and spent an extended period of time living in the Papunya Aboriginal Settlement, where he helped found a literacy program to empower local Luritja and Pintupi peoples to read and write their own languages. His haunting ‘One Last Poem’ speaks to his enduring interest in language preservation in the Northern Territory; it is a poem that gave me chills when I discovered it, and I know it will do the same for readers of this anthology.

  This past year, the Australian poetry community also lost Dimitris Tsaloumas, a brilliant and humane poet whose work I have loved for as long as I have been a reader of Australian poetry. There have been many wonderful tributes to him by those who knew him best, including Vrasidas Karalis in the Sydney Review of Books, Helen Nickas in Australian Poetry Journal and Antigone Kefala in Rochford Street Review; these essays speak not only to his superb poetry but also to his seminal work in translation and the way in which his writing, while always highly regarded by peers and critics, has been somewhat neglected due to his position as a poet of the Greek diaspora; as Nickas writes, ‘Tsaloumas remained largely an outsider in Australia.’ This neglect does a great disservice to his exceptional body of poems; I am sure that future generations of readers, poets and critics will return to his oeuvre and see his extraordinary contribution to Australian literature.

  Due to his ailing health, Tsaloumas was unable to write in his last years, which is why I could not represent him within the pages of this anthology with a recent poem. Instead, he will have the last say of this introduction, via lines from one of his best-loved poems, ‘Note With Interlude From the Banks of The Brisbane in September’, first published in his classic volume Falcon Drinking. The poem begins with the poet sitting beside a ‘fawn-thick’ Brisbane River that ‘gifts a city with loveliness’, prompting him to enter into a fantasia about ‘days of happiness’ with the hetaerae of Ancient Greece: a reverie brought about by a sudden visitation of poetry, of ‘words come forth again, / unfathomable, out of yellow-paged time’. Here, Tsaloumas writes about the ways in which the poet’s work – punctuated by delight and exuberance – is ultimately fleeting for the poet, beginning and ending in doubt. He reminds us, too, of the great gift poets leave behind for their readers, of the treasury of their enduring works. Tsaloumas, Stoneking and Harrison were all fine, original, necessary poets whose works reverberate with the concerns of their time; while their vital works and voices will endure, we will miss them in the years to come.

  I write because

  this ache gets sharper with the years

  and my truth is but a husk of substance

  wasted, my strength no longer adequate

  to breast the song of the rock-bound sisters.

  My message is this: in the old cupboard

  in the wall, beside the mirror

  opposite the bed, you’ll find some papers

  held in a roll with string:

  please burn them. Youthful,

  possibly happy stuff, I can’t recall –

  things one could redeem perhaps

  in leaner times, but burn them nonetheless.

  This has been preying on my mind of late,

  but if I am to end this journey at all

  it’ll have to be as I began, expecting nothing.

  Sarah Holland-Batt

  * Dougan, Lucy and Zwicky, Fay. “Plain Speech: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journals.” Axon: Creative Explorations 5.2 (Nov 2015)

  Patio

  At any moment

  any slice or gash,

  a huge explosion falling

  in any direction –

  outside the window

  a swatch of bladed leaves

  sways this way that way

  inside the frame:

  wordless day bounces

  down the tree’s bare limbs,

  through its outspread flamboyance

  toward twigs and wattle-birds

  while they maraud sticky cream flowers

  as if beauty could be instantly

  sucked from the world.

  Directly. Without irony.

  Martin Harrison

  Black Winged Stilts

  Two long, plaited, clouds of cotton-wool fog

  Roll across exposed mudflats as tide runs in.

  Morning sunlight bleeds an opaque water

  Coloured script onto the tide— it sets loose

  A word I discovered once in a poem

  On Black Hawk Island: ‘condensare’.

  Scatterings of black winged stilts fly in

  To make a landing on the bay. They are taller

  Than the early spoonbills, royal ones,

  A river’s vanishing poets. The stilts slowly

  Step forward, up to their bright pink knees in mud,

  Spearing a crunchy breakfast as they go.

  The black winged stilts keep a quick eye

  On a lone human with a camera aimed at them.

  Pictures dissolve, let’s say images should

  Disappear, like the poetry of birds—before

  We invent a language for the final entry, before

  The need for a sleek soul and a slim presence.

  A black winged stilt is a loaded bow,

  It’s needle beak, the arrow. Lorine Niedecker

  Called her writing room ‘this condensery’

  And said her trade was to sit at a desk and condense.

  This occurred a while back, these days poets

  Learn to muddy the page and expand.

  Gathering bullhead memories in a seine net

  The heaviest break through the mesh.

  A mangrove tree at the end of the mind is draped

  With her father’s net, caught thoughts

  Fade as slime dries in the sun. Minutes ago,

  A line ago, the black winged stilts were wading,

  Gathering spoonbill poems, yabbies, soldier crabs.

  The birds have flown, taken their poems

  Neatly tucked into a book, Judith Wright’s ‘Birds’

  Forget the vanishing poets. Breathe life

  Into hollow bones, take heart in backwater craft.

  Carry language, a mullet’s leaping joy, on your breath:

  I have come to believe the black winged stilts

  Carry knowledge of their particular death.

  Robert Adamson

  In The Billy Sing Baghdad Bar-and-Grill

  I’d heard the director didn’t need an Asian to play him,

  young Billy Sing, Gallipoli’s finest sniper.

  After all our Kylie could play a geisha.

  His Dad was a drover from Shanghai,

  his mother Mary-Ann from Staffordshire.

  Proud member, model minority hard

  working, civil, didn’t do anger or shout,

  no doctor had to fix his face.

  Essentially Us, a little whitewash

  with a good spotter – a novel
ist.

  Productive, liked good roast duck fried rice.

  Could have met my ancestor, the Captain

  who rode in the cavalry, sold beer,

  was mayor of the city staffed with his progeny.

  Strengths? At Gallipoli Sing bowled a long spell

  under mortar bombardment.

  Billie Sing shooting Turks by the hundreds,

  brave but hardly suicidal –

  no North Korean human wave bullshit,

  the Bravery column balanced the Common Sense column.

  Why give away your position?

  Weaknesses: Sang-froid? Myalgia?

  Who needs to know in the Billy Sing

  Baghdad Bar-and-Grill.

  Adam Aitken

  —this light exists —that dark

  divides —death clouds into —Euclidean

  space & locally —compacts I

  love you —therefore the lemma

  may —may not be true

  this flame which burns this

  lamp which shines the logical

  constant in your eyes &

  linear truth that “light exists”

  I cannot confirm this proof

  Jordie Albiston

  Advanced Souvlaki

  A kookaburra sits on the cage

  at the top of the rusty stinkpole

  with a neckless air of gravity.

  A man with a spirit level trips.

  The grandad caravan with its crown

  of loudspeakers is back from Darwin.

  If the question is still, What’s the point

  of anything at all? there’s nothing

  left to start to make an answer from.

  Behind the cluttered yard that will be

  three dark garage spaces for crickets

  to stridulate in, a cottage squats.

  The dead man’s fingers are red in claw.

  Pizza and scandalized reaction

  are proffered in a mini-playground

  with a massive sandstone portico.

  It should have been abundantly clear

  for some time now that you’re with stupid.

  It’s the conference of the currawongs;

  no ambulance can interrupt it.

  Two fresh-faced Euro-canvassers tread

  the narrow path to the hoarder’s door.

  In front of the gutted shop that was

  Advanced Souvlaki, a rubber kid

  tries his rabona kick on a stone

  and ¡GOL! I can’t fault those arguments

  to justify despair. You know that.

  Chris Andrews

  Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal

  Above his desk it is written:

  ‘I wish I knew the names of all the birds.’

  I know this room through tessellation of leaf and branch,

  wurahŋ-bil and jaran-gir,

  in the shade of a kulsetsi—

  (Cherokee) ‘honey locust’ [a flowering tree].

  I am relearning these hills and saltwaters

  and all the places wrapped around this room

  We both have dagahral here,

  lovers/fathers/friends/conquerors/

  ghosts.

  But here, in this new and ancient place,

  I ask him to name the song that swoops through this mosaic:

  Sometimes it is wattlebird sometimes it is currawong—

  when we drive, he tells me king parrot, fairy wren, black

  cockatoo

  and I know jalwahn and bilin bilin and ngarehr

  but the rest are just nunganybil,

  the rest are just: ‘bird’

  It is hard to unlearn a language:

  to unspeak the empire,

  to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,

  a topographic intonation.

  So in this place the shape of my place

  I am trying to sing like hill and saltwater,

  to use old words from an old country that I have never walked

  on:

  bundjalung jagum ngai, nganduwal nyuyaya,

  and god, I don’t even know

  if I’m saying it right.

  But I watch the bark twist:

  grey and slate and vanilla and vermillion

  he tells me this is ribbon gum—

  so I find five words for this bark

  and I promise I will learn them all

  Because to hold him is to hold the tree

  that holds these birds I cannot name,

  and a word spoken here

  might almost sound like home.

  We are relearning this place through poetry:

  I open my book and say, wayan,

  here is a word which means road, but also root

  and in it I am rooted, earthed,

  singing between two lands

  I learn that balun is both river and milky way,

  and that he is baray-gir, the youngest child

  and the top of the tree,

  where the gahr will come to rest—

  to call its own name

  across the canopy,

  long after his word for it

  is gone.

  Evelyn Araluen

  A Panegyric for Toads

  These slum-lords of burrows and tree-hollows

  are on the move, dozens of pulsing lung-sacs

  ‘a little ventriloquism of ducks’ singing in the spring.

  Folklore says the toad’s a shape-shifter — rancour,

  and primeval trouble in its head, devil-worship

  on its tongue, its third eye-lid perpetually wiping

  away the sight of ghosts. A toad will leave a glaze

  of poison on your hand, but you can forgive

  it for this — look at those copper-red eyes leasing

  fire to the damp core of evening; listen to their calls

  in the reeds like the low-plucked strings of ouds;

  and how, sometimes, as if led by an unseen conductor,

  sensing peril, the singing instantaneously stops.

  At first their mating will look like a congregational

  laying on of hands, whose purpose, you could

  think, is not to spawn, but to heal their warts.

  Some say toads are always belching, breaking

  wind, eating each other’s shed skin, but I’d happily

  kiss a toad on her sombre, gargoylean mouth,

  follow her gawky walk to the slime-scented pond

  where she must climb over a thick layer

  of frog-spawn, and scrumming indissolubly

  with a group of males, an iron-lock embrace

  they won’t break for days, risk drowning for sex.

  Unlike frogs, loaded with the rapid taut and release

  of sling-shot legs, toads like us, must land-walk,

  eat with short tongues, bull their way across earth.

  Judith Beveridge

  Dark Heart

  I look in here—this

  notebook—& see

  the notes for the

  last review I did,

  & note—that I am

  about to write another.

  Tho I would rather

  write something else.

  I whistle bop a bit

  try not to think

  of the vast tide of crap

  the exhibition represents,

  check the sky: sere,

  grey, pale up one end

  of the street,

  almost Neapolitan

  at the other

  (pale, but a distinct

  blue, some

  dark smudged stain

  drifting over it,

  much closer to

  than the far blue

  behind—blown,

  in those paintings,

  from a volcano

  somewhere at hand—

  almost like flak

  in the old movies.

  (Goya’s

  mantilla, & parasol—

 
& the rumour,

  nothing lasts)

  #

  It makes the

  sky darker too

  an atmosphere

  not a backdrop

  #

  a small figure

  further down

  Hindley Street

  is crossing the road—

  I recognize the coat

  as much as the figure—

  but who?

  #

  It is about time

  I had a drink with Crab.

  About time for a

  lot of things.

  What to do

  about this art?

  I whistle

  ‘You’re My Thrill’

  the beginning

  —but, whistling it,

  I end up,

  as always, with

  the ‘Perry Mason Theme’

  (I think)

  (it is

  so long since I have

  heard it)

  Instantly recognisable

  when I was a kid.

  I thought I

  didn’t like it—

  now it seems I do

  or something

  cousin to it.

  ‘You’re My Thrill’.

  Then

  ‘Couldn’t It Be You’—

  I wonder

  what the

  connection is —

  the key, the pattern,

  somehow relates?

  Its calming effect

  when whistled.

  So,

  resignation,

  ‘getting on

  with things’.

  Hate to turn

  a beautiful tune

  into a tic, a

  neurotic response

  tho again, luckily,

  it is only the

  first few bars

  I remember

  this way,

  the rest of the song

  is safe,

  unretrievable.

  When I play it

  I smile.

  This art then,

  what to do about it?

  Inflated in scale,

  naive, ‘done’ when

  its theme is recognised

  — like logos

  for a moral