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Keywords: New Australian Poems

  • 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

    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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dreaming of redemption

    • 2012 Blake Poetry Prize
    • 13 November 2012
    6 Comments

    It's the alcohol that makes me white. The magic of intoxication suits my dreaming fine. I want to be civilised. The harder I drink the whiter I get. O how I want to imbibe like a gentleman ... I want God to make me white and rich and fat.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Meeting mortality

    • Anne Elvey
    • 06 November 2012

    This is the wild thing that turns to loam, the seal pup dead on the shore, a fish caught in a crevice of rock when the tide ebbs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Rembrandt's denial of Christ

    • Grant Fraser
    • 30 October 2012
    5 Comments

    Peter, I gave you such handsome possibilities, had your face shining like a saint, and yet still, on this third occasion, you can only find a lie.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hearing God in Soviet Russia

    • Michael Sariban
    • 23 October 2012
    4 Comments

    When ideology smashed the cathedrals, turned icons into rubble, congregation into crime, religion fell down in a heap, or seemed to ... Most people believed they knew better: countless lips kept doggedly whispering the fine-print headlines of saints. If the State was a rock, religion flowed round it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Scene from an Athens newspaper office

    • Jena Woodhouse
    • 16 October 2012
    6 Comments

    The pagemakers wear masks of chronic weariness, and stubbled cheeks: stoics conditioned by a heartless press ... Smoke rises from untidy desks as from a ship that's sinking fast, taking all hands on its burning deck ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dead father's voice comes home

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 09 October 2012
    3 Comments

    'Coming up to Canberra was the worst. We came through some pretty atrocious thunderstorm weather ... It really is a delightful aircraft to fly even in those conditions.' Voice of Stuart Graham Pearce, killed as a test pilot in 1976, as heard by his son Guy 36 years later.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dodging dogma ninjas

    • Barry Gittins and Matthew Davies
    • 25 September 2012
    1 Comment

    We're strugglin' through the mythos of our parties. We're losin' gospel truths that never rang true. If life prompts metaphysical pilates, then faith is surely meant to stretch, extend you.

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