Author Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Flying Islands Pocket Poets

Gillian Swain

Leave a Comment / 2020, Author, Year

Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001).

She has poems published in various anthologies including Poetry For The Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures (2021, Littoria Press), What we Carry: Poetry on Childbearing (2021, Recent Works Press), A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2014), and others. You can also find her work in various journals such as The Australian Poetry Collaboration (2019), Burrow (Old Water Rat Publishing, v1,2,3), and Live Encounters magazine: Special Australia-New Zealand edition (May 2021) and again in the Live Encounters Magazine 12^th Anniversary edition, Vol 2 (Dec 2021).

Gillian is involved in running various poetry events including Poetry At The Pub (Newcastle) and is the Co-Director and Poetry Curator of for the Indie Writers Festival ‘IF Maitland’.

Gillian spent her childhood exploring the waterfront of Lake Macquarie and has lived in Newcastle, Northern NSW, the UK and Ghana, after finishing studies at the University of Newcastle. She lives in East Maitland with her husband and their four children, where they run their successful coffee roasting business, River Roast.

Links: www.facebook.com/GillianSwainPoet

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

My skin its own sky

Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001).

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Steve Armstrong

Leave a Comment / 2020, Author, Year

Steve Armstrong lives in Newcastle, New South Wales, and writes poetry when he’s not working as a social worker/therapist.

Described as a poet of “landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss…” (Mark Tredinnick), he won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize in 2015, the Local Award of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014 and 2019. He’s been shortlisted for the Ron Pretty Prize (twice), and the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize. What’s Left is a collection that of poems that explores what it means to walk with the world; the natural world, or in those pockets of wild close at hand in an urban environment, and for that matter, within ourselves. Broken Ground, his first collection, was released by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2018. He posts poetry on Instagram @lyricforinstance

Links: www.stevearmstrong-poesis.com

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

What’s left

What’s Left picks up where Steve’s 2018 collection Broken Ground left off, and further explores what it means to walk with the natural world. Many poems draw inspiration from classical Chinese poetry where a love of nature leads to a deeper meditation on what it means to be human. “Mengjiao – bird in an empty city”, and “pluck a lotus for pleasure – women poets of the Song Dynasty” are ASM titles that have been particularly influential.

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Ross Donlon

Leave a Comment / 2020, Author, Year

Ross Donlon is a poet, born in Sydney, who now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria.

He is widely published in Australia & also in Ireland.

He was awarded the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship in 2010 and has won two international poetry competitions, The Wenlock Poetry Festival Competition (under the auspices of the Arvon Foundation) & the Melbourne Poets’ Union International Poetry Competition.

A sequence from his book, The Blue Dressing Gown (Profile Poets) was produced for Radio National’s ‘Poetica’ in 2013.

Ross has been a frequent reader at festivals & readings in Australia and in recent years also in England, Ireland, Norway & Romania

His latest book, Sjovegen – (The Sea Road – 50 tanka for Alvik) is a collection in English / translated into nynorsk set in the Hardanger egion of Western Norway.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Ross had a poem included in ‘Best Australian Poems 2014’.

The Bread Horse

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Harold Legaspi

Leave a Comment / 2020, 2021, Author, Year

Harold Legaspi is a poet writing in Darug land. His first book, Letters in Language, was the runner-up in the inaugural Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry, was published 2021 in the Flying Islands Pocket Books of Poetry series with Cerberus Press and Association of Stories in Macau.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Letters in Language

Letters in Language re-iterates what is possible in the prose poem and autography, and is intended to evoke cultural memory. The Tagalog (Filipino) mirroring the English translations are intended to provoke monolingual speakers to question, as it conveys Harold Legaspi’s identity, being bi-lingual, in a manner of speaking, to tell his story in a language he almost forgot through the migration process into Australia. By conveying meaning in two languages, his writing functions in the most concrete way, through exemplifying not abandoning the language that raised him in a land now foreign to him.

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Robert Edmonds

Leave a Comment / 2020, 2021, Author, Year

Robert Edmonds is a poet, psychologist and clown doctor whose work has appeared in many
publications. In 2016 he was longlisted for The University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s
International Poetry Prize. In 2020 he won third prize in the $25,000 Newcastle Poetry Prize.

His first poetry collection Gravity Doesn’t Always Work was published by Flying Island Books in 2021

Links: www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A35083

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Gravity Doesn’t Always Work

His first poetry collection Gravity Doesn’t Always Work was published by Flying Island Books in 2021.

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Irina Frolova

Leave a Comment / 2020, Author, Year

Far and Wild is Irina Frolova’s first collection of poetry. It speaks to the experience of immigration and a search for belonging. It draws on fairy-tales and explores archetypes through cultural and feminist lenses.

Irina Frolova was born in Moscow in 1981, in the former Soviet Union. She moved to Australia in 2003, and now lives on the Awabakal land in NSW with her three children and two fur babies. Irina has a degree in philology from Moscow City Pedagogical University, and is currently studying psychology at Deakin University. Her work has appeared in Not Very Quiet, Australian Poetry Collaboration, Baby Teeth Journal, Rochford Street Review, The Blue Nib, and The Australian Multilingual Writing Project, as well as various anthologies. Irina is a regular at Newcastle Poetry at the Pub where she was a featured poet in January, 2019.

Links: www.facebook.com/irinafrolovapoet/

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Far and Wild

This book speaks to the experience of immigration and a search for belonging. It explores the nature of language as performative of place and consciousness, and raises the question of gendered cultural othering: what is it like to navigate Russian identity as a woman in a western country? It examines the stereotype of a Russian bride, who is seen as both submissive and a threat.

Far and Wild looks at archetypes through cultural and feminist lenses.

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KA Rees

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Come the Bones

Her debut poetry collection.

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Chris Mansell

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Foxline

Foxline reconnoiters the relationship between the land and the creatures on it: Man (a farmer), and Fox. The relationship between the creatures themselves reveals their alien natures. Both claim the land for themselves but neither is autochthonous. They are opposed to each other but have an understanding and an alliance nevertheless because they both kill and have nowhere else.

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Myron Lysenko

Leave a Comment / 2020, Author, Year

Myron Lysenko began writing haiku and senryu in the late 1990’s.

He is the Victorian Representative for the Australian Haiku Society. He has published five books of poetry and one of haiku/senryu. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world. Myron has run almost 50 public and private ginko since 2008. A ginko is a haiku outing in a scenic spot where people write haiku, then share and discuss them. Myron has been writing, performing, publishing, editing and conducting poetry workshops since 1980. He was a founding editor (with Kevin Brophy) of the lively independent literary magazine Going Down Swinging from 1980 to 1994, which they then passed on to new editors. The magazine recently celebrated its fortieth year anniversary with a bumper issue.

Links: myronlysenko.wordpress.com

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

a ghost gum leans over

Myron Lysenko’s ‘a ghost gum leans over’ is bigger than most haiku books being published today. The book is divided into sections or sequences, including his daughter’s battle with cancer spanning ten years; a year where a relationship breaks down and splits a family in two; a section of light poems, another of heavy poems and one about Lysenko’s local area in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria. The sixth section consists of haiku written for special occasions.

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