Merima Dizdarevic
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Self-Preservation Sans Aesthetic Principles
images by Bekim GašI
D
Patrick Dubost
French poet, play and puppet play writer, Is the author of more than 30 books and 2 C.Ds. He studied mathmatics and mucicology. Publishes at age 24, he started to pen poems not only on paper but through sounds in electroacoustic studios as well. (He is one of the founding members of the collective of poets Ecrits-Studio – website : ecritsstudio.free.fr) He is well known for his performances and readings, making his texts to be heard through his voice but also through gestures, transmitting his energy and playng sound tracks he creates for the occasion. His poetry explores metaphisical questions while his eyes linger tenderly on the world. He has been invited to many poetry events in France and abroad. His work has been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Italian, Greek and English. He also writes humorous and falsely naïve books under the pen name of his counterpart and kindred spirit « Armand Le Poête».
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
no need to say anything: preceded by life as a score
sans besoin de rien dire translated Kit Kelen and Béatrice Machet
Tug Dumbly
Tug Dumbly is the name, and sometimes Albatross, of Geoff Forrester, a poet and performer who has worked widely in live venues, schools, and radio. As a performer, he set up and ran some seminal spoken word nights in Sydney, including the legendary and drunken Bardflys. He has performed his poems and songs as a regular weekly guest on Triple J and ABC radio (on the programs of James Valentine and Richard Glover), as well as writing and recording for radio his ABC-syndicated culture and current affairs satire The Tug Report. He has released two spoken word CDs through the ABC – Junk Culture Lullabies and Idiom Savant – once won the Spirit of Woodford storytelling award, twice won the Banjo Paterson Prize for Comic Verse, and three times won the Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup.
Printwise, his work has appeared in publications including the Australian, the Canberra Times, Southerly, the Australian Poetry Journal and The Blue Nib. In 2020 he had two poems shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize, for which he was also shortlisted in 2019. In 2020 he won the Borranga Poetry Prize, and was runner up in the WB Yeats Poetry Prize. In 2019 he was longlisted (for the second time) for the Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. His first poetry collection, Son Songs, came out through Flying Islands Books in 2018.
Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_Dumbly
tugdumbly.blogspot.com/
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Son Songs
Ross Donlon
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
4 bits that may or may not end up going somewhere
Goths are having a séance
in the Cubby House at Bunnings.
There are Skinheads in the Potting Mix.
Hipsters cook cow penises
at the sausage sizzle. Lowest
prices are just the beginning.
*
Epistemological, Ontological …
I look these words up
every six months.
But I still don’t know
what they mean, not really.
Couldn’t define them if asked.
I think it’s something like
How do I know
that what I know
is what I know?
I dunno. Maybe if Noel Coward
turned it into a song
I’d start to understand.
*
Her poems are never ending
compendiums of comparison,
like pin cushions for similes.
Yes, it’s a nice poetic device.
But you don’t have to detonate it,
like a cluster bomb, at every line
*
There’s a hobo living in the Big Potato.
They can’t evict him,
though it’s made of asbestos.
But he doesn’t care about OH & S.
Someone’s sprayed a dick and balls
on the big prawn
the big banana just got smaller
the big koala is angry
at the crowds drawn by
the big lump of coal
and the big jet ski
and the Big Clive Palmer, with
the café in its head, is looking shabby,
its eyes chewed out by cockies.
4 bits that may or may not end up going somewhere Read More »
Spruce
Check the neatness
of the homeless
under Glebe rail bridge –
to each their own arch
open plan, plein air
here a brushed tent
a swag-bed rolled
camp bed made
cardboard pantry
wardrobe trolley.
Minimilists
before their time.
A ragman’s bike
a spirit cooker …
what’s to declutter?
what forsake?
Arty bastards.
yes
even
the gravel
looks Zen raked.
You’re tidy shamed
by a pair of shoes
in the spick & span sun
a’bask in the arch
so sweetly arrayed.
The dirty mercy
of house proud poverty
don’t need no maid.
Suitcase Found
Little box of bones
raped and smothered
(if that was the order)
packed in a suitcase
like a ventriloquist doll
left by a desert highway
a thousand miles from home
a little mummy ripened
in sweltered undiscovery
years longer
than your life had been.
No one missed you.
Raised and used like veal.
Your mother no help.
She dead already in a forest
by the same lover
who stuffed your mouth
with a tea towel
like a washed-up glass.
‘He sat emotionless in the dock …’
Sorry little box
we’re not all like that.
You just have to catch us
on a good day.
For Khandalyce and Karlie Pearce-Stevenson.
Ross Donlon
Born in Ashfield, Sydney and now living in Castlemaine, Victoria, Ross Donlon has published five collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks. First published in The Bulletin in his teens, he enjoyed (you might say) a long break of over thirty years before publishing again, a second budding, as Judith Rodriguez once said.
After many years of travel and working at all sorts before arriving at teaching (state secondary and some tertiary), he is now mostly retired and travelling again. Happily, he has featured at some poetry and arts festivals in various parts of Australia as well as in Europe, and has spent considerable time in Norway, a country with a society and political system close to his heart.
Active in Castlemaine arts, he convened literary components of three state festivals and has run poetry readings for many years. These feature local, Melbourne, interstate and even some international poets, such as English poet Chrys Salt, in 2019, and Scot, Hugh McMillan slated for 2021, but who knows whether Hugh will make it.
As publisher of Mark Time Books, he acted as editor for a number of leading Australian poets, and lately two poets in the U.K.
A program on the now lost Radio National program, Poetica, was devoted to a sequence of poems about his father, a U.S, serviceman he never met. A beautiful production.
He has been lately featured on Zoom readings at events from Scotland, England and Nashville, Tennessee.
Ross’s own poetry has received favourable reviews in national newspapers in Australia if not literary journals – he’s that kind of poet.
He would add a pic here if he knew how. Great to otherwise be a part of the Flying Islands experience.
His Flying Islands pocketbook is, The Bread Horse, which features his own etching. ‘The First Horse’ on the cover.
