THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 19, October, 2010

WARREN BURT

Correspondence

August 31, 2010
Wollongong

Hi Kris!

My cousin Wilbur has been doing genealogical research, and although he's found some interesting stuff in the past (we're very distant relations with both Walt Whitman (yay!) and Dick Cheney (boo!)) he's finally struck gold. My grandfather's grandfather John Burt had a brother, Foght Burt, and Foght had a son Richard, who became a civil war hero and a poet. Had quite a few things published too. You'll be happy to know that the stuff is pretty amazing doggerel - William McGonagal comes to mind. Here's a sample:

http://www.warrenburt.com/richard-welling-burt-archive/

We did a bicentennial piece, of course, in 88. Richard beat us to it by 112 years. I've only read the first page, and I have no doubt that that's all you'll read as well. However, out of misplaced family loyalty, I think I'll try to make it through all 20 pages. I might even have some computer voices speak parts of it - although I don't know how far I'll get with that. Read it and weep! Tears of hilarity, I hope.

Cheers,

Warren

oOo

I have read the dialog with you and Cathy [Kris Hemensley & Catherine O'Brien, Art & About in Vientiane, #2, August, 2010, re- Hans Georg Berger's photography & etc.], and found it fascinating. That the abbot had a huge photography collection is not surprising in one
sense, but a delightful surprise in another.

There are a lot of amazing stories of East West contact. One of my favorite is about the Japanese composer of the 30s and 40s - Mr Ozawa (I forget his first name). He studied with Schoenberg in Berlin, then went back to Japan, and wrote orchestral music in a style very similar to the French neo-classicist Francis Poulenc. Things like the Kamikaze Piano Concerto (not related to WWII suicide bombers, but the experimental fighter plane of the 1930s, which was quite an innovation when it happened, apparently). These days, my Japanese composer friends are more than faintly embarrassed by the renewed interest in him in the West...but it is pretty amazing - the unknown "Sept" of "Les Six" and he lived in obscurity in Tokyo......

---------------------------------------------------------------


JUSTIN CLEMENS


3 POEMS

*

Space Pen

The manufacturer informs us:
It writes UNDERWATER!
In 400° CENTIGRADE!
In ZERO GRAVITY!

So tell me, my friend —
where do you plan to use it?

*


Perfective II

EMPTY fur-flesh
skin-fear uneffaced;
even meat there found
its letter-plug
litter of silenced earth.

*

Oh to hello ago I go agogo

The more I know his trumpet ‘tis truly so
me trumpet’s trumpet pinned his pegs akimbo,
clyster-pipes and organs humpherumphing happily
hanging a tail by many a wind instrument that blew
the bag-men’s big cheeks pup-puffing up to kiss
the equipment of their pleasures — reserve
this vessel for my lord! they insinuate,
as if they’d walk to Palestine for a touch
of his nether lips and a long hard look down the gyrating barrel
of the biggest revulva youse or I’s has ever seens.


---------------------------------------------------

TINA GIANNOUKOS

from SONNETS


III

When you touch me it is the hand of God.
I agree to restrain the gravity of this emotion.
I begin the long march in death's dominion.
I bear the thought imperfectly that I'm alone.

Mona Lisa's smile remains enigmatic.
This is the only wisdom I possess:
They marked you. They marked you all your life.
Moonlight still shines on what you left behind.

The will is muscular. Like muscle, it tears.
You sentence me to hard labour. Once,
I was beautiful but that was rapture.
The tongue of love tastes tough in these bull days.

This is the conspiracy of the figure two:
the flowers in the garden grow mottled.


oOo


XXX

When the time comes, whenever that be,
I shall look back to my ancestors,
seafarers all, gliding over oceans,
now coming into ports. This earth,
this blue planet, will not circumscribe me.
I will sail across the empty doom searching
for cyclopean marvels; a half-horse, half-man
figure will appear from behind that band
of stars beyond the edge of the Milky Way.
The astrophysics of our encounter,
this dark energy of love, are unknown.
In a singular moment the explosion
that drove all things apart drove us too.
In space I hold the horn of plenty.


------------------------------------------------------------

JENNIFER HARRISON


Ian McBryde’s The Adoption Order
(published by 5 Islands Press 2009)

[Launch Speech presented at Collected Works 15.10.09]

Rapture be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer
(Rapture, lyric by Blondie)

It’s a privilege to launch Ian McBryde’s sixth major collection of poetry, The Adoption Order, here at Collected Works by grace of Kris and Retta Hemensley. Thanks to Ian and 5 Islands Press for the honour. I hadn’t actually seen the book until tonight but I can see the fine publishing job accomplished by Kevin Brophy, Dan Disney and Lyn Hatherly at 5 Islands Press. When I was reading Ian’s book in manuscript form, as I have several times over the last few weeks, I began to think about the light and dark, the beauty and horror, that makes Ian’s poetry so wild and impressively individual. The French poet René Char once said (quote taken from The Poet’s Work):

‘behind the poet’s shutter of blood burns the cry of a force that will destroy itself
because it abhors force . . . Read me. Read me again. He (the poet) does not always come
away unscathed from his page, but like the poor, he knows how to make use of the
olive’s eternity.’

Or as Blondie expressed it in a lyric from her 1981 single Rapture:

Rapture, be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer.

In The Adoption Order Ian does not flinch from the dark and desolate places of the heart. From the dystopian palace in the poem ‘News from the Palace’ to the abandoned landscape of ‘Tunnel 3’ with its nameless station, its unknown slope, its unreadable lights, its rusted, unused rails, its uncertain carriages and clammy track to nowhere, we enter an imagination that is surreal, tender and savage. Take, for example, these memorable lines from the poem ‘A Second Lake’ (the quote is the entire poem):

Deep in the interior water has cut stone open, filled in
the scar, iced over. No fish swim beneath this seal,
and no animals venture down to test the edge
of this ripped shore, this brittle lace,
this ghost of gauze over the old
and frozen wound.

Take note of the arrangement of the words on the page, the inexorable tightening of skin over that strange and frosty wound. An Ian McBryde poem is never un-imperilled. Words are never wasted. His imagery is both elemental, often of the sea, the dream, the cave, the animal - and his imagery is sharper than the sound of the words that make the image—by which I mean it is the visual elements of Ian’s imagery that etch themselves so sharply on the mind. Whether this particular talent comes from Ian’s drawing and illustrative abilities I’m not sure. It is a talent.

Blondie’s Deborah Harry, was also adopted and although many of the poems in Ian’s The Adoption Order do touch on that theme, the poems seems less interested in recording or evoking confessional feelings about adoption or loss and more concerned with embodying the ongoing struggle of words to ground themselves in a world where loss, separation and grief happen. I spent some time thinking about why these poems, despite their sometimes bleak imagery, are so moving, so emotionally chiselled and fulfilling to read. I did not experience them as nihilistic, but as generous. I think it has something to do with what, again, the French lyricist poet René Char (1907-1988)[1] said (as reported by Edward Hirsch in How To Fall in Love with Poetry): that ‘the poem is the realised love of desire still desiring’. The Russian poet Tsvetaeva asks ‘what shall I do as I go over the bridge of my enchanted visions that cannot be weighed in a world that deals only in weights and measure?’

Whether it is the child who desires a mother or father they might never know, or a lover who desires the one they might never attain or keep, or the adult who desires a childhood that continues to mesmerise time, Ian is exploring marooned desire, a grief that somehow becomes a wound of history because we are always losing the present and never in perfect harmony with the world. Perhaps love and loss are the Castor and Pollux of poetry, the twinned forces which poetry attempts to reconcile yet ultimately fails because the past, the beloved are beyond the temporality of language. As Ian says in the last stanza of the villanelle ‘We Touch On and are Lifted from the Earth’:

All our art is the murmuring of surf
Love is where the sea spray meets and marries.
We touch on and are lifted from the earth.
We now are past the moment of our birth.

and later in ‘38th Parallel’: ‘ I have learned nothing but thirst, the only truth of the marooned’.

And later, still, in ‘A Silhouette on Water’:

The image quivers, disperses, splits into

patterns of shadow and elusive light which
never really finish, never really begin.

We often talk about the strength of image in this or that poetry or in this or that poem, as though it is in opposition to weaknesses of image. In Ian’s poetry imagery isn’t a strength, it is the essence of the poetry. The book is a beautiful imagining of imagery. And so beautiful. Here in the poem ‘Before Waking’: ‘I dreamt rain on slate. I dreamt fine china carefully arranged on the floors of caves.’ When I read these images, these lines, I think of carefully arranged words in the darkness of the poem’s cave, I think of all the cultural history of civilisation from the cave to Doulton’s fine bone china factories and I think of human skulls, Pompeii and the fragility of bones. Every poem in The Adoption Order is a scene of spare, concentrated imagery, a dramatic distillation of the lyric’s power and each poem is a play where the self takes centre stage as landscape, as divided mirror or as a numbed survivor on a raft drifting.

The whispering of the poems is intimate as though it’s assumed that you, too, are familiar with the longhouse, the disintegrating palace, the old and frozen scar and the faces of the other children of the raft. The language is very precise and the choice of a particular word often startling. For example, consider the final lines from ‘Instead of Your Breast’ (again reproduced here in its entirety):

Instead of your breast
a ghost treasure,
an alarm sent out.
Instead of your voice
the locked wing,
the lightning shield.
Instead of your breath
a jungle of drums
and the gathering dusk.
Instead of your hands
the terminal, the stretched
mile and instead of your
presence, the faces of
other children of the raft.

Instead of other possibilities (other children on the raft) these are the children of the raft: children who are perhaps destined for dangerous sadness, adventure and drifting. When I read these lines I think of Klaus Kinski in the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, (the final scenes of the film when monkeys overcome the raft); I think of asylum seekers adrift, I think of the literature of shipwreck and of the often vulnerable children I work with as a child psychiatrist. This power of imagery does not open a small niche in experience – this imagery opens a tender Pandora’s box of history, both personal and shared, both particular and ethereal.

The Adoption Order is about the power of families. It begins with a poem called ‘Genealogy’ and ends with a poem called ‘Motherlode’. In between are poems about the loneliness of childhood, about the pain of adoption, about the Irish diaspora. And there are magnificent elegies for lost parents. The poem ‘Satellite’ from Ian’s first book The Shade of Angels (1990) re-appears and Ian and has given us another poem/chapter from the ongoing sequence ‘Reports from the Palace’ a sequence which threads through his earlier published works, with versions appearing in The Familiar (1994), Flank (1998) and Equatorial (2001). Thus, in terms of the process of the book, poems can be traced back to past collections as one might also trace the genealogy of a family (or be unable to do so, at least in the past, if adopted). The Adoption Order is the fruit of many generations of poems, not only Ian’s. McBryde’s ‘Icarus’ joins a long tradition of Icarus poems including those of Auden and William Carlos Williams to name just two. This is one of my favourite poems in the book, although to say so feels a little unfair to myself as I value so many. In this Icarus tale, the son’s fiery death is the final triumph which frees him from family and, strangely, this poem seems to capture the actual moment a real event becomes myth.

Icarus (Last Words)

As I fall I watch
my father float
to safety on less
rapid atmosphere

His wings intact,
he hovers high above
me as I plummet.

And yet long after
he lands, long after he
is held in my mother’s

grieving arms it is not
his wisdom but
my bright death that will
be celebrated.

My ribbons of wax.
My shout in the clouds.

A glassy sea beneath
me as I melt and am
finally unfeathered.

At last I have
honoured my island.
I have passed beyond
family. I will be

Falling for centuries,
suspended forever
in the rich, dense air
of legend.

This is a classy, humane book. It deserves great respect and recognition. Although working at an interface that is almost pre-speech, pre-definition these poems are paradoxical artworks of precise speech, chiselled lyricism, formal refrain and earthy textures carved into the cave wall of a page. The Adoption Order is a book of dreams, a book of riddles and a book which fears the end of dreams. René Char said in ‘The Formal Share’: ‘It is from a lack of inner justice that the poet suffers most in his relations with the world. Caliban’s sewer window, behind which Ariel’s powerful and sensitive eyes are angry.’; Ian McBryde says:

I bit the rain.

oOo

Notes:

[1] Rene Char’s mature poetry was published in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France; his poetry is at once a lyrical summoning of natural correspondences and a meditation on poetry itself; his single line famous poem To the Health of the Serpent’—published in Fureur etmystère, Éditions Gallimard, 1962—for me has a kinship with Ian’s fabulous one-line poems published in Slivers, Flat Chat Poets, 2005.


-------------------------------------------------------------------


ANNE KIRKER


THE PORTRAIT

I am hung
next to paintings
about the same size -
an unorthodox
(conservative-wise)
gesture
nailed into place

One precise metre
from the curlicues of
my frame
a landscape with tower
is abstracted into
vertical planes
defying depth

From the other side
florid dahlias
in their crystal vase
suggest a tasteful encounter
with the zig-zag
rhythm of my
portrait's scarf

These companions
are unknown to me
(and I to them)
though we are linked
capriciously for a month
as intimates
on public display


------------------------------------------------------------------

DAVID SHEPHERD


KING KONG GOT IT WRONG:
NO MAN IS A MANHATTAN

That ain't no monkey on my back
It's a gorilla

That insidious old ape
Still crouches on my shoulder
He's perched up there
Like Goya's grinning ghoul

He just climbed up
My skyscraper spine
You can still see
The marks he made

He razed my city
To the ground
And stole my loved one
With his gnarled hand

He's too big
And heavy
To stay up there for long
One good bi-plane
To the back of the head
He'll fall a hundred stories
And crush everything

Then I'll be rid of him

Until the next organ grinder
Comes to town
And his simian side kick
Casts his dark shadow
Down my long haul
Whispering
Every man is a Manhattan

[2004]

oOo


ACROSS CHERRY LAKE

Smokestack
Bellows black
Bluffing its way
Into innocent clouds.

Turner's torrid trowel
Smears
The bloody sunset

Grey

Broken winged duck
Last spastic dance
On dim mirror plate.

Chimney vomit
Turns white
Near night.

Atomic bomb crucifix
Smites the sun
Of man.

Burning tonsure.

Cold halo.

[Winter, 2010]


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CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

WARREN BURT prolific composer & performer, for many years on the Melbourne scene, currently in Wollongong. His website is www.warrenburt.com

JUSTIN CLEMENS active in literature, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, art criticism, & is the author of several books including The Mundiad (Black Inc, '04), Black River (re.press, '07), Villain (Hunter Publishers, 2009). Phew! He teaches at the University of Melbourne.
<>

TINA GIANNOUKOS has published In A Bigger City (Five Islands Press, '05). She teaches at University of Melbourne where she is completing her PHD. In 2010 addressed a conference in Shanghai, read at the Beijing Bookworm & gave lecture in Beijing. Link to the review of In a Bigger City
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras/article/view/444/490
Her review of Angela Gardner's Views of the Hudson in Jacket 40:
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-gardner-rb-giannoukos.shtml

JENNIFER HARRISON has published several collections including Michaelangelo's Prisoners ('95), which won that year's Anne Elder Award; & most recently Folly & Grief (Black Pepper, '06), & Colombine : New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper, Melbourne, '10). Co-edited with Kate Waterhouse, Motherlode : Australian Women's Poetry, 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, '09).

ANNE KIRKER, well known as a curator of modern & contemporary painting in New Zealand & Australia; appears in Poems & Pieces, # 1, & #8. Her website is, www.annekirker.com.au

DAVID SHEPHERD's website is http://www.terrorlostralis.blogspot.com/ which contains extensive biography. Similarly see http://fitzroydreaming.blogspot.com/ for recent feature with Dave Ellison on Karl Gallagher's illustrious site.

ISLE OF WIGHT DREAMING

ISLE OF WIGHT DREAMING : Robin Ford's On the Brink (Cinnamon Press, Wales, 2010)


Leaping out of a catalogue description of Robin Ford's new book of poems, On the Brink, from Cinnamon Press, his third, was the reference to the Isle of Wight. I didnt know his name but instantly he was my man! --the open sesame for the Island of which my own dream has always been waiting. (Long gone, I readily confess, my younger shrinking, taught by betters, from any such affiliation. The notion of poets representing this or that geographic region considered an utter joke --as though poetry was separated from the poets' own places or rather, ought to be, for the language's sake. Another of my generation's exciting but specious mutual-exclusivities which provided for the beauty of the autonomous object whilst undermining the truth of description & evocation.)
My brother Bernard, reviving as a small publisher with a renewed interest in the local via his Stingy Artist press in Weymouth, is keen now to foster my Dorset connection, as though I really were a 'Dorset poet'! --after all, I've been visiting Dorset since 1987, a few years after my younger siblings moved there from neighbouring Hampshire, followed by my parents. And Dorset's inner & outer landscapes have certainly inspired me in ways that Hampshire, apart from the New Forest, never did. However, because of what the catalogue had aroused in me, I suddenly rankled at Dorset's definitive claim! At least, I thought, if Dorset then Hampshire & the Isle of Wight too! Southampton & environs is something else : it was where I grew up, my home, the place from where one dreamt the future and opposed the small town tyrannies. But Ryde, Isle of Wight, was my birthplace, where my grandmother lived for decades (at Tangley Lodge, Salisbury Road) and where we holidayed through childhood & teens. The last time as a family was in 1965, the summer before my emigration to Australia, a brief sojourn sandwiched between clerking on British Railways in London, travelling on the Continent, & sailing on the Fairstar (I was a one-voyage mariner, jettisoned just as I was getting the hang of my hold & shop duties, worst luck).
My father, who grew up on the Island, suggested to me that perhaps we'd make a trip there, walk around his childhood haunts (Ryde, Bembridge), but it never happened. Instead I went myself, visiting my uncle Dennis there in 1996, accomplishing the reorientation Dad & I had planned. He, of course, was all ears for my report. In retrospect, lack of sleep & jet-lag from the Melbourne flight was the perfect preparation for the encounter --and my uncle's no show at both Waterloo & Portsmouth just another share of transcontinental displacement. But he was waiting at Ryde, --and all over the place in Ryde as that & succeeding days arranged themselves around his peripateticism & the wild oscillation of his sleeping & waking. Four a.m. kettle-boiling & cups of tea ushering in conversations to last the day about literature & philosophy (he was full of Ray Monk's biography of Bertrand Russell I recall) & music; walking miles around town & into the country; drinking with his young & old cronies at the London-style pub (captured for me now from memory of Graham Greene's novel or the film of Brighton Rock) --where 'London style' implicates all Southern England, transcending rural society's cap-doffing hierarchy --wherever found & whomever has the readies uncoupling ease from class --the comfortable shabbiness of carpet & furniture, and much the same for the patrons whether or not of the spiv & toff, flit & bot segment of Uncle Dennis's society.

I imagined Robin Ford's poems delivering me a version of my dream, but I should have known that dreams arent ever on tap to one's bidding! The cover of On the Brink (& that title should have been a warning) is an Isle of Wight view --cliffs, shale, white-tipped incoming seas, the dark-blue depths, the fast clouds in a sun-washed sky. And there in the centre of the book the sequence Wight.
Instantly he's given it to me, for example, At Dimbola in Freshwater (which is all about the famous Julia Margaret Cameron) : "Tennyson of course, a private path and gate for him / from Farringford, all the fashionable and great / who take up Freshwater : Browning, Darwin, Millais, / happy to pose as kings and mythic figures, Dodson's / Alice, staying up the road, whole lot fixed for us / by silver nitrate..." Or, In Clerken Lane : "Fooled by nostalgia I leave the main way, totter / on a muddy tightrope of a track, ridged high, slippery / with autumn, find it now cut short mid-way, mid-air."
There's a lovely thing apparently derived from a 1930s IOW memoir by wonderfully named Fred Mew -- A Glorious Morning 1913 : "I sit by Blackgang Chine / four hundred feet above a sea / that's brilliant, blue, / a thin, white line of foam / kissing at red shingle beach / which stretches from / St. Catherine's Point up to / the dreaded ledge at Atherfield, / graveyard of many fine ships ..." --a precious postcard.
From On Chalk, last verse : "and in an abandoned marlpit / when I brush againt / bramble dock coltsfoot / where it's claggy / thistle spring and anthill tussocked / I turn child again" -- more or less the idyll's caption.
Contrast the 2nd verse of the scene-setting Flotsam : "We walk the low tide shore; a cloudy day, storm passed, / sand dull and flat. Lugworm casts like walnuts, / knot and dunlin feeding at the water's curl. / Above sea's usual reach a mesh of blowsy rubbish: / cans, plastic, oil, tar-clogged garments, rope. / There's been a wreck along the coast, cargo flicked / off decks, tossed from holds and split containers. / Round the bay a line of heavy duty rubber gloves / gagged up by sea, orange as funeral garlands on the Ganges, / fingers splayed as if cold hands, at last gasp reach, lay dead in them: / Albatross, Sirenia, Irex, Clarendon." Of course it's an elegy, governed by essential pathos, but the utterly particular vocabulary is indispensable.
Juxtaposition elsewhere of "in summer sweet, by autumn treacherous" speaks to our Isle of Wight poet's internal & external weathers...


Let's suppose one hadnt gone instantly to the Wight section; instead read first the Asyla & Faustus poems. Then one would have begun with terror ("that haunted wing, my mind") & been riveted by the collection's major poem, Audrey at Whitecroft (--"the former county lunatic asylum on the Isle of Wight" , Ford notes, "later the psychiatric hospital until it closed in the 1980s" --where, indeed, he was too (Whitecroft Revisited 30 Years On), "The old wards named for poets: Shakespeare, Browning, T.S. Eliot. / Gascoyne had his time here. "). This memorable dramatic monologue features a female persona ("They called me Screamer. I do not think I screamed / but it was better not to question them. "), whose testimonial, ameliorative of what in other hands would be diatribe, reminds me just a little of James Dickey's May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church --it is transported, heightened, & similarly transgressive god-talk.
"My world seemed right for me alone, when I felt sad or down / and violence came my way, I could enter it to blessed peace, // a meadow filled with ox-eye daisies, quaking grass and sorrel / with fairies fine as dragon flies. I quickly learned it was unwise to tell / the doctors of this special place because, in envy (their own hell), / they turned the taps on me, brought out syringes, wet towels, // said I was away with birds and so I was and that is how I wished to stay / but even birdsong turned to screams which seemed inside of me; then I / was sent into the cells for days, where peepholes watched me, demon's eyes. / I wrestled myself quiet, ate filth they pushed at me through long, bad days // of stinking rain, carbolic soap and loneliness..."
A lifetime of institutional degradation passes followed by the advent of mental health's 'Community' solution. And then, one late day, "a nurse, a good one, best of seven, / taught me embroidery. My world lit up. I saw my brilliant heaven / through her, for God has many means to show Himself to us, the open eyed. // Suddenly I found my voice. // (....) Silks, wools, cottons, they worked with me as if the linen wed the thread. / I grew well, though old. One day they said, You have your own home now. /Shocked I left the ward in fear, bid farewell to every flower, / walked down the drive. Then God said, Audrey, come. And I was glad."

Audrey cant help but be a kind of surrogate, genuine creation though she also is --it's more to the point that Robin Ford's own experience of illness ("my storm of sickness"; "How to still a mind that pours / unstoppable as water over weir") & institution --that is, the ability to absorb & transform what any life throws at one --conflates exquisitely with the fiction : if not the character's doings then the atmospheres inhabited & projected.
Treacherous to take any work of art literally, as though it were an affidavit, yet feeling (pitch, ambit, tone) always attracts narrative. Why, for example, in The Oxus, the Indus and the Aral Sea, doubt this poet's confidence :

When I am well again I will lie on a chalk hillside,
breathe calmly, turn my head to see sunset fall

on sedge, burnet, harebells, float on scent of thyme
and marjoram; spring will warm my bones and over me

crossbow swifts will wheel and tumble. My eyes
will rejoice with hawkbit, speedwell, scabious,

bloodspot orchids will be the only stain the world knows,
my mind will be a new hatched butterfly

testing unexpected wings(...)

In my book it's the chalk hillside, the herbs, flowers, grasses, the birds of any season that constitutes the restorative. Indubitably, no dream, even of the Isle of Wight, without shadows, but Dream & dreaming nonetheless.


---------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley
September 2nd-October 8th, 2010

ROBERT GRAY AND PETRA WHITE READING AT COLLECTED WORKS!

Collected Works Bookshop's first poetry event of Spring is on Monday, 4th October, when we host Robert Gray & Petra White. It's an honest to goodness reading not a launching but hopefully a swag of Robert's older title, New & Selected Poems, will arrive in time to supplement his most recent, the prose memoir, The Land I Came Through Last (Giramondo, 2008). We will also have copies of Petra's second & recent collection, The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010).
Let's fill the Shop!

time : 6 for 6.30
wine & nibbles : YES!
address : level 1, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, City
enquiries : tel 9654 8873

*

Ray Liversidge's reading/launching advertized in the M P U newsletter, POAM, for October 14th at Collected Works, has been postponed until November 11th. More information closer to the date.