Tag: Festschrift

“London” by Kevin Hart

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You take a trip to London for a laugh And in a brawling boozy sleep you dream The Queen has kicked the bucket. “Treachery!”   They scream, and soon enough some stiff old gent With scratchy wig roars out, “Off with his head!” (Then whispers, “Nothing personal, old boy.”)   Turns out that you’re awake: they’re dragging you To Tower Hill, and it’s a lovely day! Turns out you gotta tip the brawny guy,   No cash, and so you give him all your cards. “It’s nothin’ personal,” the headsman says. Next thing your skull is leering from a bridge…

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John Watson: “David Brooks in Slovenia”

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Words || John Watson  ‘Swimming when the bell strikes five’: The bell shakes drops into the sea, The fifth finds me, as ever, there. Swallows like jets on swooping raids Sky-larking in the pulsing air “Make my head their conning tower.’ Then wasps in summer heat drop in To sip sweet wine lees from the glass ‘And dip their feet in cooling waves.’ Dusk comes at last. The swallows nest. The wasps have gone. The night still warm ‘I write until the bell strikes ten.’ He swan-dives round and through the page; Wasp-like he harvests subtle lees. He writes and writes…

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Andrew Burke reviews Pam Brown’s ‘click here for what we do’ & Ken Bolton’s ‘Starting at Basheer’s’

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“One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing.” Maurice Blanchot These two books sit on my desk with my favourite pages marked like kite feathers: Pam Brown’s click here for what we do and Ken Bolton’s Starting At Basheer’s, both published by VAGABOND PRESS in 2018. These two poets have been publishing through many different publishers at regular intervals since the Sixties, both with titles numbering in their twenties. The world around them has changed markedly and yet their creative personalities still shine…

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Simeon Kronenberg: “Rain” and “Unaccompanied”

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These poems are part of the Long Paddock series for 78.1 Festschrift: David Brooks.  Unaccompanied Reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage   You write of an igniting field, scrapes on bone   about half puddled snow and lonely souls   buried in ill-fitting clothes or decked on a car ferry   as it engines white water backing in to dock and home,   where someone waits with tea and biscuits wanting news.   You watch up close, but you’re targeted,   hedged in, as if discovered running guns after days of rain.   Rain I love the rain as it clatters…

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The Sheep That I Am

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This piece is from the Long Paddock series for 78.1 Festschrift: David Brooks  By Orpheus (Pumpkin) Merino [Transcribed into human language by Teya Brooks Pribac] ‘What is a vegan?’ I asked mum. She told us that that kind lady, Michelle, who always brings nice bread when she visits, is putting together a festschrift (another word we didn’t understand but it turned out to be far less complicated than the first one) for dad. Since mum often reads to us before putting us to bed with our evening snacks we thought it would be fun, when the issue is out, to…

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“The Shell Road Atlas” by Andrew Taylor

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Nowhere along here do the maps offer much more than a hope we’re heading the right way. Each page offers a new start and confirmation of the Irish saying ‘If you want to get there you shouldn’t be starting from here.’ The place names are printed so small they’re self-effacing, roads wander and peter out like creeks in a drought, mountains of course are paper flat and the red hatching of a firing range is mute but enticing. Cartographers in some quiet studios have traced their reveries across these pages of beautiful artwork, while here wind blows, birds sing, and…

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Podcast: David Brooks reads poems from ‘Open House’

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 Podcast duration: 16 mins  This issue of Southerly pays tribute to David Brooks, who is retiring as editor after two decades’ stewardship. It includes poetry, fiction, essays and memoir that interweave readings of David’s work with accounts of the various literary communities that David has worked in over four decades from Canberra to North America, Perth, Slovenia, Sydney and now, Katoomba. Together, these pieces create a world of a very specific kind, one populated by words and word people and the currents between them in specific times and places. They also enable us to draw out recurrent themes and practices. The…

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