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Keywords: New Australian Poems

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A wild new pope

    • Barry Gittins, Brian Doyle and B. A. Breen
    • 12 March 2013
    8 Comments

    Man, yeah, I would be pope, if the phone rang, late at night, collect from the Vatican. Yes, I would, if I could do it right. I'd call a meeting of the Curia and say boys, we are letting women run everything for the next five years. Each of you gets a new boss in high heels.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Auden dines with Barry Humphries

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 05 March 2013
    1 Comment

    What I fear is that on Judgment Day one's punishment will be to hear God reciting by heart the poems I would have written had my life been good.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Blood cancer solidarity

    • Peter Mitchell
    • 26 February 2013
    3 Comments

    Mars-sunset eyes deep sunk, prune wrinkled hide, cheek bones protruding like clenched fists, hovers above the bed of respite. In the silence, this fellow-feeling fissures the lines of my ordinary features.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learning to sail both ways

    • Graham Kershaw
    • 12 February 2013
    1 Comment

    Don't you seek a centre, an object of devotion? Don't you seek a primal source of light? In the evening, on verandahs, in the dark, in the rain ... Don't you go inside quickly and drink yourself blind? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Diabetica and other poems

    • Les Murray
    • 05 February 2013
    3 Comments

    A man coughs like a box and turns on yellow light to follow his bladder out over the gunwale of his bed. He yawns upright trying not to dot the floor with little advance pees.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Teaching literature to rock stars

    • Brian Matthews
    • 01 February 2013
    2 Comments

    He appeared in the doorway of my study one day in 1971 and asked if I was the one who was starting a course in Australian literature. His voice was soft and melodic, his accent beautifully Irish. Born in Belfast in 1947, he had grown up amid the horrors of 'The Troubles' and would in later years refer to himself as 'a recovering Catholic'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mortality made articulate

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 29 January 2013
    2 Comments

    For what, I ask you, was somebody called our saviour in the turbulent middle-east (still in trouble, of course it must be) two long Ks ago? Light flickered on dwellers in death's dark shadow yet those turbulent sandy nations truckle on, just where their ancestors ambled out of Africa toward the hideogram of history.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Love poem to a Hills Hoist

    • Kevin Gillam
    • 22 January 2013

    dear hoist, still standing? still spinning? still lapped by buffalo? we loved you. weren't allowed to of course. but we did. draped over, swung from, cranked up and down, merry-go-round on green sea. Mum's peeling carrots, voice piercing the flywire.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Island Christmas

    • Various
    • 18 December 2012

    Ceilings creep upward in silent communion. Porcelain hands like the soft robes of Jesus, reach across a domed fresco from Bethlehem to Nazareth ... When darkness settles on rocks and stones, old churches shrug back into themselves, back into their timber rafters that squeak a thousand Amens.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Empathy and irony in post-Howard Australia

    • Barry Gittins
    • 11 December 2012
    1 Comment

    Becalmed, bereft, besieged by race memory and hip pocket absorption, a nation of travellers and seafarers swallow leaders' sleight-of-hand, as they conjure pirates from refugees, demons from daughters, sons and lovers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A keyboard or a drone

    • Various
    • 04 December 2012
    4 Comments

    Have this photograph ... In the body strewn pavement see the cardboard huts. Digitally processed. Glossy finish. As I rattle my tin, may it rattle your conscience? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    City rush hour adventures

    • Peter Bakowski
    • 20 November 2012
    3 Comments

    What a gift is hunger. Because of it your ancestors left their caves, explored plains, valleys, rivers, seas. Their adventures became stories, paintings, songs. There's the story of each person, on the trains, trams, street corners. How vulnerable you are, how strong you are.

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