Nature strip

Poems

Nana’s Hair

    Her heavy thick plaits were destined to be dipped into inkwells by boys. She turned sixteen, was determined to cut it short. Her father, devastated, didn’t talk to her for weeks. Free and light, she kept the plait woven into a comb.   The first time I came across it was a surprise. [...]

Poems

Grandad’s Passover

    I open Nana’s recipe book, find the Passover recipe. Soak currants, glace cherries, orange peel in a Kiddush cup of sweet kosher wine. Cream butter and sugar, add six eggs one by one, almond and matzo meal with a teaspoon of cinnamon. I want this magic-spell recipe to make him remember.   We [...]

Poems

The three genders: women, men, consumerism

Gifts for her: delicate pretty dainty charming girly female jewelry up to 50% off!!! Our new black sleek electric razor, only $299 will make you instantly manlier and somehow more ripped! confident! heroic! virile! Versatile: use it to subdue your pubes or mince all those carrots (only two bucks a kilo!) But she uses it [...]

Poems

OK

  computers can’t compete with an old bloke clad well, grant me that much, at least, & he’s got the know-how, & lying in a drawer at home a t-shirt which says in a large-impact font        GIFTED LIVER, & sure, more power to him & his gang i say, they’re still working the net [...]

Poems

water

water   a dark cloud hangs but if rain falls it evaporates before it hits while            millions of toilets flush sinks drain            the shutter shake release repeat of sprinklers in Summerlin & Green Valley golf courses suck it up.           our banter over the star- burst where i bit my cheek, that ridgeline i run my tongue [...]

Reviews

Review The Sorrow in our Marrow, Domestic Interior by Fiona Wright

                          “Domestic Interior” by Fiona Wright                                                                            Giramondo Publishing Poetry, Paperback, 96pp 2017 $24.00 Print ISBN: 9781925336566 Reviewed by [...]

Poems

on Fremont

on Fremont                                     – In its most basic sense, skepticism is about radical doubt: do we                                         exist? Do others exist? Can we communicate at all?”   white trees with branches reaching to rest on barrel vault steel Chantilly, spider web-like            fingers   like you do on the table (upside down) when making a point [...]

Postcard

A Postcard from the Katharine Susannah Pritchard Writer’s Centre Residency

The view from the desk at 'Aldridge', one of the writing studios at the KSPWC, Greenmount , WA, Australia with the Perth skyline on the horizon. I had reached a very difficult point in the writing of the first draft of my verse novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette and needed some dedicated time [...]

Poems

i get those messages all the time

i get those messages all the time   i think high-rise i think windows i think here’s an idea i’d play with in a box            for a while then we’d let go real concrete real chill.            i put on my hat & walking shoes. i take me to the impolitic, the inalienable. do steps do [...]

Poems

from UNCOOKED LEGACY Sonnets 23 & 27

from UNCOOKED LEGACY   Sonnets 23 & 27       XXIII   the sun hangs heavy    trying to master the viewshafts before being swallowed by shadows half-developed & clambering people write stories on park benches people have rings in their noses    some have metal coils dangling from holes in the flesh you [...]

Reviews

Review Novenas for the Zeitgeist, Flood Damages by Eunice Andrada

                              “Flood Damages” by Eunice Andrada   Giramondo Publishing Company, 2018, $24 80 pp, Print ISBN : 9781925336665 Reviewed by Jena Woodhouse   The Acknowledgements to this first collection of poems by Eunice Andrada begin with the following sentence: For the single mothers, the undocumented immigrant parents, the survivors of trauma after trauma, flood after [...]

Reviews

Review Welcome to struggle town (rinse & repeat), Newcastle Sonnets by Keri Glastonbury

Newcastle Sonnets Keri Glastonbury Giramondo, 78pp $24   Review by Angela Gardner   The sonnet has been around in various stylistic incarnations for half a millennia. It is obviously a durable form, possibly due to its flexibility and, despite its brevity, its ability to accommodate more than one image or direction. The modern sonnet with [...]

Poems

Well trodden

Well trodden   1 swamp pheasant mounts the carcass of white goods sensuously in the clearing scattered with hikers' bulging knees   performing: yeasty overcoats fall from shoulders            cultivating a view        gamble on   waterfalls too loud         sitting with camera ferociously poised   wilderness the cavernous belly button pressing mouth through moth-coloured cotton   inhale [...]

Reviews

Review For nothing, more than nothing… For birds, sky… Anywhy by Jennifer Harrison

Anywhy by Jennifer Harrison Black Pepper Publishing, 2018, 96pp, $24   Review by Mark Prendergast   How do you read Jennifer Harrison? Some critics have emphasized the performative in her work and the adoption of masks to, at once, inveigle and distance the reader. Others highlight questions of travel, positioning Harrison as lyric psychogeographer. Contrary [...]

Poems

Who Put the Mock in Democracy?

Who put the Mock in Democracy? Classless my arse. Body is class entirely. The beach a leveller? Well it is. Just depends who’s levelling. The hierarchy military, flesh ranked sharp as a hammer smashed thumb a crashing inner parade of fascist boobs and abs, flashing meat medallions of bella donna beach bitch polarized Il Duce. [...]

Poems

Father Faith

Father Faith Eyes shut tight against sunlight you get those motes and Meccano bits protozoa sinking in a primal soup gone cold. Or like birds just hit a window sliding, cartoon style, down the red screen of the inner eye. That’s one version. Another: soon as he entered church sidled into the pew and sat [...]

Poems

Saint

I never asked for a refill but the sky is full of the usual dark again. The only good bulb in the house is out as if the only good bulb is an out bulb. Waiting for this hangover to pass is like playing dead: lying on your back & praying as the ghost of [...]

Poems

For eyes that shine (a cutup using text from Adrian Plass’ Silences and Nonsenses: Collected Poetry, Doggerel, and Whimsy)

Poems

The Camargue in Early Spring

A gleaming necklet of brass cicadas circles the throat of Spring; after the Feast of Sainte Sara they’ll start to sing. Camargue houses with backs to the north, the buffeting force of the brusque Mistral, catch undertones of siren notes piped and droned through reeds of the Rhône. Sainte Sara in her finery, in the [...]

Poems

Man sitting in a garden near to Lukely Brook

I’d be an old man but for medicine, watching each climbing leaf against local stone, tracing a time line defying the weight of silt and shit, seeking, if not the stars, the light, the sense of means possessed outside of time, seasons a sleeper stirring, rising or burrowing through strata of a dream, building memories [...]

Editorial

Issue 16 Editorial by Angela Gardner and Carmen Leigh Keates

  Welcome to another edition of foam:e! It’s another bumper issue, packed with poems and reviews. Languages play  a crucial role in people’s daily lives. The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IY2019) to raise awareness. In Australia, of the estimated original 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander [...]

Poems

Sold Out II

And here we have the slot machine dug out like a prize from a cornflakes box with a genuine imitation gold-plated arm, a wind-up mouth that speaks! And how! Prise it apart to see the monkey mechanic wrench and key, the lightweight board and blunt green screen where quizzes are conceived for the time-passing pathos [...]

Poems

Wasn’t Listening

  & you weren’t with me either & we rehearsed our insertions   & waited for something objectionable & went on like that for quite a while   & then we got worn down & couldn’t hear anyway   & all we had was ourselves & so much more we couldn’t recall  

Poems

reversed

you were the first to make eye contact   let’s be the suck-ups at the front   Federal Highway she thought the sign read Bush  anger   deals with feels   she went to move her hand   and her other hand moved   that just about sums up our relationship   I can see by [...]

Reviews

Review – Ambient Light, Tourniquet by Vanessa Page

                                    Tourniquet by Vanessa Page Walleah Press 2018, 68 pp ISBN 9781877010866 $20.00                                Review by Jena Woodhouse   The word “cinematic” has been applied to Vanessa Page’s poetry, and it seems an apt descriptor of the way the reader watches the writer move through her landscapes, public and private, in light and in [...]

Poems

OK

  computers can’t compete with an old bloke clad well, grant me that much, at least, & he’s got the know-how, & lying in a drawer at home a t-shirt which says in a large-impact font        GIFTED LIVER, & sure, more power to him & his gang i say, they’re still working the net [...]

Poems

the minutiae

Poems

for a few years

Reviews

Review – From you to me / To you from me / It’s a start / Heart to heart, Aboriginal Country by Lisa Bellear

  Lisa Bellear, Aboriginal Country, edited by Jen Jewel Brown UWA Publishing, Crawley, WA, 2018, 96pp,  $22.99   Reviewed by Estelle Castro-Koshy   Lisa Marie Bellear (1961-2006) was an ambassador of change during her life time. Her new collection of poetry, Aboriginal Country, edited by Jen Jewel Brown and published posthumously (UWA Publishing, 2018), is [...]

Poems

In a Kelly town museum

In a Kelly town museum   near the bluestone step on which Byrne   stuck a boot as he gunned down   Sherritt, the mummified conjoined heads   of a freak calf hang upon a meat hook

Poems

The three genders: women, men, consumerism

Gifts for her: delicate pretty dainty charming girly female jewelry up to 50% off!!! Our new black sleek electric razor, only $299 will make you instantly manlier and somehow more ripped! confident! heroic! virile! Versatile: use it to subdue your pubes or mince all those carrots (only two bucks a kilo!) But she uses it [...]

Reviews

Review – “A rose is a rose is a fist …” Tim Thorne: A prophet in his own land, Running out of entropy by Tim Thorne.

Running out of entropy Tim Thorne Walleah Press, Hobart, Australia, 2018 ISBN 9781877010804 94pp, $AU20.00 https://walleahpress.com.au/   Review by Anne Kellas     Walleah Press deserves high praise for its ongoing publishing record. The single-minded dedication of Ralph Wessman and his role as a publisher of poetry in Australia has been summed up by Christopher [...]

Poems

Once more with feeling

  Once More, With Feeling And if I have a soul my soul is green And if it sings it doesn’t sing to me And if it loves it loves externally Both what it has and what it hasn’t seen Sophie Hannah’s ‘A soul’   I am pig. I fly by day, unseen but not [...]

Poems

Deep throat

In sleep, a meek balding man, floating in his dust-jacket, crawled into our throats. He pushed the bristles of his wooden handled broom up and up through the windy night. Mistaking us for a South Kensington gutter. Or a field of leftover landmines from either Indochina War. Come morning we lifted away the broken bushes [...]

Poems

Grandad’s Passover

    I open Nana’s recipe book, find the Passover recipe. Soak currants, glace cherries, orange peel in a Kiddush cup of sweet kosher wine. Cream butter and sugar, add six eggs one by one, almond and matzo meal with a teaspoon of cinnamon. I want this magic-spell recipe to make him remember.   We [...]

Poems

some beaux pres(id)ents

  Ronald Wilson Reagan 1981-1989   wondering & so a world was riding on & on down a road   we did, we are doing, we will do & so no one original is allowed in a world   will we read or else will we wonder less & less           [...]

Reviews

Review – Inwrought gold and shadowed light, Sun Music: New and Selected Poems by Judith Beveridge

  Sun Music: New and Selected Poems: Judith Beveridge Giramondo Publishing, 2018 RRP $26.95 ISBN 978-1-92533-688-7   Review by Caren Florance   A Selected is an interesting career point for any poet, especially one as carefully excellent as Judith Beveridge. It is a chance to look back and then keep moving, unlike the respectful entombment [...]

Poems

Lift

Lift First comes the melding together of steel, like a modesty curtain. Then the quaint ding, clinical in its timing. We stand, suited shoulder to shoulder, boxed in, absurdly intimate. The silence that descends is unknown even in the otherworldly hearing of moths. Then suddenly it strikes: self-consciousness. Of course, nothing can be given away, [...]

Poems

Nana’s Hair

    Her heavy thick plaits were destined to be dipped into inkwells by boys. She turned sixteen, was determined to cut it short. Her father, devastated, didn’t talk to her for weeks. Free and light, she kept the plait woven into a comb.   The first time I came across it was a surprise. [...]

Reviews

Review – When the Stones Began to Sing, Stone Mother Tongue by Annamaria Weldon

  Stone Mother Tongue by Annamaria Weldon, UWAP 2018 136pp $22.99 ISBN: 9781742589930                  Reviewed by Jena Woodhouse Annamaria Weldon’s Stone Mother Tongue is an ambitious and accomplished poetry collection, encompassing a vast swathe of time and many civilisations within a geographically confined, compact topos: Malta, the poet’s ancestral place of provenance, described in the [...]

Poems

Night Falling

Night Falling In Memory of Candy Royalle What did you see as night was falling? The vastness of the plains, the grass radiant with its secret knowledge, and then the darkness deepening. Did the world speak to you as to a shaman? There are always signs and daemons, but they were no longer for me [...]