Ruby Street

There's a new poem from me at Cordite , just this week, called Bearing False Witness . It's part of their latest feature issue called Umami , edited by Luke Davies. My poem comes from an ongoing series of prose poems I've been writing on-and-off for many years. Occasionally one of them gets published. I have thought, from time-to-time, of putting them out in a small book, but I suspect that won't happen. So, catch 'em if you can. Speaking of Cordite , there's another recent poem of mine there as well, called In My Shifts , published as part of their (also) current TransTasman issue, edited by Bonny Cassidy. My irregular blogging past meant I hadn't noted it here until now, as I haven't noted a lot of things here over the last couple of years.

One of the few places you get some in depth discussion of Australian literature, including, from time-to-time poetry, is the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (phew - just call it JASAL). In the latest issue there's a fascinating article by Bonny Cassidy on the poetry of Jennifer Rankin . Bonny did a terrific paper at an ASAL mini-conference in February of this year, looking at Rankin's work through an eco-poetic lens. This article takes a different tack. To quote the abstract: "Attention to Jennifer Rankin's poetry was spare within her lifetime. Twenty-eight years after her death, the time has come to challenge her critical reception and to recognise the importance of her poetics on its own terms. Her work has an antithetical relationship to the generation of '68, and the shadowy place that it takes among the poetry of her peers can be defined by its struggle against subjectivity; a poetics at odds with John Tranter's descripti...