Ruby Street

So, my next book is scheduled to appear from Five Islands Press some time next year (2017), most likely mid-year. First of all, my thanks to the editorial team at Five Islands for inviting me to publish with them. It was, actually, a surprise, a welcome one of course. It's not the first time I've published with Five Islands. My second book, the now out-of-print Flagging Down Time , came out during the Press's Wollongong-Ron Pretty years in the 90s. Nice to be back in the catalogue. The book, currently titled Brink , will contain poems I've written over a number of years. In fact, in the draft I'm finalising, there are poems published over a decade ago and even a couple whose first drafts happened in the late 1990s, though they have been through many edits since then. One poem consists solely of words and phrases mined from my first and now also out-of-print book, The Mask and the Jagged Star . Brink is, thus, an accumulative book, though there will be fairly re...

The 'what I've been doing' conversation could go on for a while, especially given that, in this space, it's been a long time between drinks. For the nonce, I'll narrow it down to one small corner of 'what I've been doing recently'. One version can be seen in a few poems that were published in March this year in John Tranter's new Journal of Poetics Research . Here they are: Five poems in Journal of Poetics Research The older poem is 'Free Hand: A Kind of Thinking'. As well as, obviously, being a kind of ars poetica, it's length and its syntactic energies are different to the other poems, especially the first three. These may, or may not, appear in print later this year. I presume you can tell they are more stripped back, obviously shorter, full of questions and even imperatives (not so much in these but in others I've been writing), less image-driven, impatient. Whether I'll continue in this vein much longer, I don't know....