from Mannequin’s Guide to Utopias
One thorned with frowns.
One with a pet neurosis, will of warm butter.
One with a fixed smile overlaying the wince
of dreamless obedience. Bit part, all, in a minor empire
of flimsy skeletons and mouths that only say yes.
Each with a pocket mirror, casting the uncracked glance.
Dan Disney’s ‘Departmental’ Read More »
‘I don’t want to die
without you knowing who I am’.
That’s what you once said to me, Mum.
Parents are a puzzle to be handed on.
‘I won’t always have you, I haven’t got you now’,
I think to look at my daughter and son.
They’ll come to sing this self-same song:
Parents are a puzzle to be handed on.
Like old boardgames
with some piece gone – Scrabble, Cluedo,
Monopoly, Mahjong –
Parents are a puzzle to be handed on.
I know a part of the song you sung,
but will never cease trying to learn that song,
a madrigal roundelay, long and long
my children will riddle at when I’m gone
some spilling mystery that refills as it runs,
sings ‘bless all our sweet sun-buttered skulls..
Parents are a puzzle to be handed on
Parents are a puzzle to be handed on’.
‘Parents are a Puzzle to be Handed On’ by Tug Dumbly Read More »
the colonists always pack old spectres and memory, mad apparition, peers through cracks in day
we scatter into, our words ascending across air… and once that’s out, silence
fllas like love, but permanent, empires lying dormant (unstuffed toys) we’ll kiss the photographs flat when gone
while wrong-headed statues promise nothing yet to the gods new foregrounds arrive, unrecognizable
from Dan Disney’s “Mannequins Guide to Utopias” Read More »
Old farm sheds perfect parallelograms leaning aslant in a frozen dance with the wind.
Evening clouds a slow salmon as you breathe through the gills of the sky.
How easy it is for things to go right to let slip the weight of expectation duck the pendulum of pessimism let it swing into the shadows like a slow swooping bat.
from Tug Dumbly’s “Son Songs” Read More »
snowdrop, then daffodil, pink on a rose branch, green on a climber suddenly parsley then mint
from Laurie Duggan’s “A Kite Hangs Above the Border” Read More »
i hate them
the truth is out. and they hate me.
them, the barbarians in baseballs hats,
twisting in chairs lined up in artificial order,
and carving their loathing on the tabletops.
do you know why the roman empire fell? I ask.
who cares? a boy giggles.
that is the reason, i say
you are old & fat, they say.
they are young & fat, I don’t say
because i don’t want them to get healthy.
they can stay ugly and stupid so I can despise them.
why envy the awkward root they didn’t have
or their perfect wet dreams pearling
on the television screen?
…Rae Desmond Jones’ ‘Decline and Fall’ Read More »
This Festive Season
For Peter Wells
‘you will always be/ that sole cigarette ember
on a summer night/ blending into the wilds of the garden
you planted behind a sentinel of spiders’ — Morgan Bell
Top heavy, agapanthus, heralds of the season
kiss the ground at the front of our house
after so much unseasonal rain and seasonal sunshine.
Next door has blue ones and ours are mauve
both virginal, reminding me of my husband’s late aunt
who gifted the flowers over thirty years ago
when the house was new. She was the one who shocked
her granddaughter, uninitiated in religious life
when she lay prostrate at Christ Church Cathedral.
On the western side Christmas colours of green and red
abound, including firecracker or cigarette plant.
Grown taller than I am, there’s money plant
if you’re superstitious, or jade if you romance.
A burgundy crepe myrtle my best friend gave as a miniature
thrives, something my friend couldn’t manage.
Along that side there’s grevillea robusta, bottlebrush
native frangipani, macadamia and multiple tibouchina, masking
the view of Munibung Hill. Recent weather caused
the Havana cigar plant to creep horizontally on the path
impenetrable for the aged and unstable. There’s a place
for us though without leaving the house to partake
in shinrin-yoku, the Japanese art of ‘forest bathing’.
From my kitchen chair I look across a covered deck, a walkway
and melaleucas that fold and unfold to acreage of eucalypts, so tall
they dissolve the horizon. This year a poinsettia glows in a bulbous
terracotta pot. Following the sun’s path throughout the day
allows a sharpening of senses and calm descending.
Left alone, nature carouses. Scruffy needn’t equal ugly.
Sometimes heaven touches earth and when it happens here
it’s a blessing for randomness, since the contrived are unfavoured.
Jan Dean
Common or Garden Poets #10 – Jan Dean inviting Peter Wells Read More »
Laurie Duggan, born in Melbourne and later a resident of Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, moved from Australia to the UK in 2006, and returned to Australia in 2018. His recent books include Selected Poems 1971–2017 and No Particular Place To Go (both published by Shearsman in the UK), and a reissue of his first two books as East and Under the Weather (Puncher & Wattman). He is also the author of Ghost Nation (UQP), a history of modernist tendencies in Australian art.
Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Duggan
Rae Desmond Jones (11 August 1941 – 27 June 2017) was an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer and politician.
Rae Desmond Jones was born in the mining town of Broken Hill in the far West of New South Wales. Although many of his poems and stories are concerned with urban experience, he always felt that desert landscapes were central to his language and perception. He wrote in colloquial language, which sometimes exploded in powerful narratives packed with ambiguous sexual and violent imagery, especially in his earlier poems and some of his novels. His original and bleak vision was frequently mediated by gusts of earthy humour and unexpected sensitivity and honesty.
He became a popular mayor of Ashfield, an inner Sydney Municipality, from 2004 to 2006, and during that period held together a broad coalition of Labor Party, Green and Independent representatives. He said that for him “poetry and politics are mutually contradictory, and he finds consolation from each in the arms of the other.”
Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rae_Desmond_Jones
When I got a hold of Rae Desmond Jones’ pocket-sized collection Decline and Fall I knew from the moment I opened it and began reading I was in for an interesting and affecting ride. Yes, I’m a fan, and I was excited at the prospect of a small gathering of his previously published works (this was, of course, prior to his recent New and Selected Poems, It Comes from All Direction Grand Parade Poets, 2013).
To those who read Australian poetry, Jones is a fascinating presence, who has carved out his place in our literature as a unique, important and challenging voice, simultaneously relevant and visionary, often writing outside of the usual subjects or taking them from an obscure angle, and addressing those that are so often shied away from. Just look at Jones’ infamous poem “The Deadshits”, for example, which narrates a gang rape through the eyes of one of the perpetrators. Not Wordworth’s usual choice of subject, that’s for sure, but this is what distances Jones from the pack and makes him increasingly special, if that’s the right word. Although this poem is not included in Decline and Fall, there are plenty of others that address the unaddressable in a way that is intelligent, beautiful, humorous and more often than not, haunting.
Continue reading review by Robbie Coburn at rochfordstreetreview.com/2014/01/10/let-there-be-war-between-us-robbie-coburn-reviews-decline-and-fall-by-rae-desmond-jones/
Originally from Australia, Dan Disney has lived in South Korea for the last decade, where he teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul. His collections include and then when the (John Leonard Press), either, Orpheus (UWAP), and Report from a border (Light-Trap Press). He is editor of Beyond Babel: Creative Writing in Second Language Contexts (John Benjamins), and co-edited both Writing to the Wire (UWAP, with Kit Kelen), an anthology of poems protesting the dehumanization of people seeking political asylum in Australia, and New Directions in Australian Poetry (Palgrave, with Matthew Hall), in which a number of Australian poets theorize on the ethical possibilities of creative production into the early 21st century.
In National Library of Australia