The Best Australian Poems 2012

By John Tranter

‘I was struck … by just how many poems depended on the ancient devices of the storyteller … Many have a lyrical or meditative feel, but most have a story to tell, captured in a brief glimpse of the meaning of life, or a dramatic climax.’ —John Tranter

In this impressive anthology John Tranter weaves many threads into a portrait of Australian poetry in 2012. Emerging poets sit alongside the celebrated, travelling from Lake Havasu City to Graz, and nursing homes to fairgrounds, with characters as diverse as David Bowie, Emily Dickinson and Rumpelstiltskin. The Best Australian Poems 2012 will satisfy a hunger for storytelling and a yearning for beauty.

John Tranter is the author of more than twenty books. His 2006 poetry collection Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected won multiple awards, including the Victorian, NSW and South Australian Premiers’ Prizes. His latest book is Starlight: 150 Poems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Nov 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781921870828

Book preview

Copyright

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

37–39 Langridge Street

Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

email: [e-mail]

http://www.blackincbooks.com

Introduction and this collection © John Tranter & Black Inc., 2012.

Individual poems © retained by the authors.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However where an omission has occurred, the publisher will gladly include acknowledgment in any future edition.

ISBN for eBook edition: 9781921870828

ISBN for print edition: 9781863955812

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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

Contents

John Tranter 

Introduction

Mark Young 

A line from Weldon Kees

Warrick Wynne 

Hands

Fiona Wright

Obit

Robin Wilkinson

Melbourne colour 1

Jessica L. Wilkinson

Table Manners

Petra White

The Ecstasy

Jen Webb

From: Four Cities: 3. On George Street

Alan Wearne

Anger Management: A South Coast Fable

Meredith Wattison

Dürer

John Watson

A Year before the Accident

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

You, Wallace Stevens

Rob Walker

crying at the poetry reading

Ann Vickery

Clayton’s Law of Amor Fati

Mark Tredinnick

Dog Sonnet

Tim Thorne

Importing Merwin

Maria Takolander

Night feed

Pete Spence

Takeaway.

Vivian Smith

My Island

Barnaby Smith

An Eisenhower of the Mind

Shu Ting

Good Friends

Shu Cai

Absurdity

Michael Sharkey

Ancestors in Nineteenth-Century Albums

Michael Sharkey

Where the Bunyip Builds Its Nest (five centos)

Jaya Savige

Ötzi

Andrew Sant

Camouflage

Philip Salom

Autism and

Gig Ryan

Albatross Diagram

Belinda Rule

The Note from God

Josephine Rowe

Atlantic City

Peter Rose

Magical Thinking

Mark Roberts

cameraman

Sarah Rice

Bodies

Craig Powell

Wedding Night

Claire Potter

Room of Clouds

Felicity Plunkett

Confetti by Dada

Greg Piko

The Man I’d Like To Be

A.D. Phatak

Venus’s Flower Basket

John Pfitzner

Pointless

Christine Paice

I See Him

Geoff Page

Meadow

Jan Owen

Kohlrabi Soup

David Musgrave

Hospital

Les Murray

Child Logic

Peter Murphy

Gardening

David Mortimer

Cloud Philosophy

Meg Mooney

My Town

Peter Minter

In the Serious Light of Nothing

John Miles

The lunch that we should have had

Kate Middleton

Postcard: Lake Havasu City, Arizona

Bronwyn Mehan

Horse Girls

Emily Manger

I can only sing in photos

Bronwen Manger

Moat

Caitlin Maling

To Robert Thompson

Jennifer Maiden

George Jeffreys: 11: George Jeffreys Woke Up in Langley

Rhyll McMaster

Night Ride

David McCooey

Letter to Ken Bolton

Anthony Lynch

Light

Cameron Lowe

Turkey in the Drawer

Jennifer Liston

Sampling Lily

Bella Li

Just then

Emma Lew

Lesson

Geoffrey Lehmann

Thirteen Reviews of the New Babylon Inn

Roland Leach

My Great Aunt

Anthony Lawrence

Visiting Hour

Mike Ladd

Mercurial

Karen Knight

A Factory Love Affair

Andy Kissane

The Writer Talks to Her Aspiring Fans

John Kinsella

Wild Ducks, Cambridge

Richard King

Three Apples

Frank Kellaway

Anxiety Neurosis

S.K. Kelen

Bird Diary

Jill Jones

Negative Breathing

Tiggy Johnson

Photograph

John Jenkins

The Man Who Lost Himself

Andy Jackson

A Certain Type of Poem

Darby Hudson

Culture

Duncan Hose

The Paul Revere Girls

Gregory Horne

The Family Doctor

Sarah Holland-Batt

The Quattrocento as a Waltz

Jack Hibberd

Ode to Joy

Matt Hetherington

Sometimes I Wonder What’s Going On

Stu Hatton

the six-star experience

Fran Graham

Golden but Tarnished

Lisa Gorton

The Triumphs of Caesar

Geoff Goodfellow

Reversing

Carolyn Gerrish

Domestic

Angela Gardner

Trance

Katherine Gallagher

Credo

John Frawley

The Ampu-Bloody-Tee

Toby Fitch

La Fée Verte

Liam Ferney

Two Zone Weekly

Johanna Featherstone

Ares and Aphrodite

Michael Farrell

Spoiled for Choice: 80 Ganymedes

Jeltje Fanoy

Lindfield Tempat (1980s)

Diane Fahey

Respite Weekend

Suzanne Edgar

A Strange Keepsake

Will Eaves

La Padrona

Tricia Dearborn

Memo

De Er He

Death like a shy doorframe

Sarah Day

Port

Bruce Dawe

Dog Heaven

Luke Davies

At That Moment

Toby Davidson

To My Lady under the Surgeon’s Hand

Kate Crowcroft

Snake

Jennifer Compton

After the Wake

Eva Collins

Places of Worship

Jennifer Chrystie

The Rajah Quilt

Julie Chevalier

amore of the moon

Ken Chau

Chinese Love Poem

Bonny Cassidy

Shock

Louise Carter

Commute

Ashley Capes

archaeological moment

David Campbell

do you take this man?

Larry Buttrose

The Buddha’s Bum

Joanne Burns

prang

Andrew Burke

Anaesthetics

Melinda Bufton

Some things about me that are still true (my wicked brow)

Sara Bruxner

Some Place

Pam Brown

Living

David Brooks

Broad Bean Meditation

Peter Boyle

The Guardian Angel

Rosemary Blake

Coronary

Craig Billingham

Bond

Luke Beesley

Bees Nudge the Mouth of a Feathered Rose

Cassandra Atherton

Bonds

Louis Armand

Juvenilia

Chris Andrews

Megalomania (I)

Elizabeth Allen

Catastrophe

Ali Alizadeh

The Ithacan

Robert Adamson

The Midnight Zoo

Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen

Something Wrong

Publication Details

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

I have been compiling anthologies for over forty years now. I put together my first collection, the special ‘Preface to the Seventies’ issue of Poetry Australia magazine, in early 1970, when I was still in my twenties.

Since then I have committed nearly a dozen poem collections and anthologies, as well as judging literary prizes and compiling thousands of poems for print, radio and the internet (including founding both Jacket magazine and the Australian Poetry Library website) and editing issues of periodical anthologies like this one.

How do you go about it, I am sometimes asked. For me it’s fairly simple: do it a lot, and learn as you go. Then when you are faced with a fresh bundle of poems, ‘you just go on your nerve’, as US poet Frank O’Hara said.

My method, such as it is, is to read each poem carefully and put it in one of two piles: No, or Maybe. A few days later I read through the Maybes, and reject perhaps a few, and what I have left is the anthology.

I like to conceal the name of the poet as I read each poem, partly to give myself a surprise, and partly to cancel out the unconscious bias we all have: So-and-So is a wonderful poet: this poem of hers is bound to be excellent! Or: So-and-So is an incompetent writer: this poem is sure to be a turkey. The surprise when an anonymous poem turns out to be really exciting is a thrill in itself.

*

Anthologies are generally popular, yet some poets dislike them. They say that collections of poems by lots of different writers pander to a backward-looking common taste. They complain that a handful of snippets of pretty verse is all that these customers want. These anthologies almost never print long, serious poems, they say, poems like – for example – that particular poet’s fifty-page ‘Contemplations of the Wanderer’, modelled on Longinus’s treatise ‘On the Sublime’ and Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty.

Complain as they may, anthologies of poetry are generally more widely liked than volumes of verse from a single poet. The reasons are obvious. Compilations are various, for a start, so – as a buyer – if you don’t like one poem, you may well like the next.

And general anthologies like this one also have the great advantage of presenting fresh poems by a whole range of poets you have never heard of. If the anthologist is doing her job, there will be a wide range of approaches, themes and stories, and the gamut of emotions from farce to tragedy, by a mixture of writers.

And then, because anthologies generally sell well, their cover price is usually less than the cost of a single slim volume of somebody’s poetry. Who wouldn’t prefer a hundred poems on a hundred different themes by a hundred different poets than a dozen poems all in the same tone of voice, by a poet whose work you may not like all that much in the end, when the two books cost more or less the same?

Readers like to become involved in a good story, and many poems work like stories, only of course in a briefer compass. There was a time when poems were longer: much longer. They needed to be. If you were stuck in a cave all winter long, sitting around the campfire at night with a few smelly sheep for company, you would want the visiting storyteller to spin his stories out for several months. So the ancient epics were suitably long and dramatic to ensure that the travelling bard got dozens of good feeds before his audience grew tired of his tale.

That was before the mass-produced printed novel was developed, bringing huge audiences with it. Most people in Europe could read, by then, so novels became widely popular. Then the movies arrived to entertain everybody. You didn’t need to be able to read, even, with radio, or the movies, or television. So as the decades passed, long narrative poetry, as the best means of reciting a memorised story, quietly faded away.

But somehow, poetry hung on, in its niche. I was struck, in reading through over a thousand entries for this year’s Best Australian Poems, by just how many poems depended on the ancient devices of the storyteller.

*

In that, they look back to poetry’s oldest traditions. Epics and ballads are basically narratives, and most of these were originally memorised for oral recitation, like the ballads about Robin Hood and the early epics like the ancient Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh, Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid (loosely based on The Iliad), the many Norse Sagas, the Finnish national epic The Kalevala and the Sanskrit epics The Ramayana (‘Rama’s Journey’), in 24,000 verses, and The Mahabharata, an epic of war containing extended philosophical digressions in nearly two million words of poetry and prose. The rhymes and alliteration, the stock epithets and similes, and the regular rhythmic structure all helped to make these long stories memorable.

Though poems grew shorter, long poems didn’t quite die out