Celebrating Australia: A Year in Poetry

My friend, Lorraine Marwood, has just released a new collection of poetry for children with Walker Books Australia.

She'll be appearing here shortly (within the next couple of weeks) but being also a teacher, Lorraine has set me (and other bloggers on her 'tour') a challenge. We are each to write a poem using one of her strategies. Hmm.

So stay tuned while we negotiate her appearance, and I wrestle with a new poem.

The thing about poetry

Sally Murphy recently released her new verse novel, Toppling (ill Rhian Nest James, pub Walker Books) and as part of her promotion, she invited guests to talk about poetry at her blog. There's a month worth of poetry and thoughts about poetry over there. Worth a look.

I'm March 12.

btw Toppling is a touching story about a young boy dealing with the illness of his best friend. Beautifully written.

Federation Square

Federation Square in Melbourne is a great meeting place, and works so much better than City Square ever did. From early morning to late night, it seems there is always something going on. It is meeting place, starting place, festival place...often simultaneously. Last weekend we decided to go into Fed Square to meet friends who were bicycling in from Adelaide. They'd flown to Adelaide from Newcastle. They'd done Melbourne-Newcastle a couple of years ago and wanted to link the two by ending in Fed Square where they'd begun previously. They arrived, slightly later than anticipated due to Saturday traffic on the road from Sorrento. (Yes, they'd crossed on the ferry from Queenscliff to Sorrento, because perhaps riding up from Geelong wasn't long enough???) They did then ride from Fed Square to Newport, catching the bike punt from Westgate Park. (they'd tried to catch the punt on their previous journey...but the punt wasn't running) Anyhoo, here they are in Fed Square, adding up the kilometres of their journey. Over 1200 of them, even though each bike computer registered slightly differently (different wheel dimensions?)



We were there early but there was no need to sit twiddling thumbs. There was a multicultural festival running and food stalls lining the edge of the square near the river. Fantastic smells from everywhere...from Macedonia to Brazil, from Spanish to Ethiopian and everything else in between. Pity we'd already lunched. But it was fascinating. And after we'd walked the food aisle twice we sat and listened to music from Central America. Great beat, great costumes. There was also this great ?mandala? on the pavement...enormous and decorated completely in lentils and pulses and slices of carrot! Very striking.


Next day was my birthday and we went to the restaurant where my son works...Breizoz, a French creperie. There were 16 of us and we were in the chapel out the back. It's a great space and the food was fantastic. Lovely to have so many there too. I like birthdays.


My niece picked these flowers and set them in a water glass before presenting them to me. They were exactly the colour of the table cloth and very pretty. We photographed them then they sat next to my wine glass. Tricky, because I kept almost picking the flower glass to sip water...hmm. Particularly tricky when my brother checked the flowers and pronounced them hazardous! We returned them to the garden and sent the glass to the dishwasher.


Writingwise...not a fast week. Too many competing activities, appointments etc. But two poems were shortlisted in a local poetry competition, another was picked up by 'A Poem A Week' and will appear in the next few weeks. There's been a nibble on a manuscript but I'm not reeling in the line just yet. And my computer is giving off a strange smell but a check failed to pinpoint the source...so we just have to wait for it to fail. Sigh.

Poem of the Week

My poem, 'Iceberg' is appearing on the 'A Poem A Week Project' website and blog this week. Established by local poets and authors Sherryl Clark and Meredith Costain, the site aims to bring local poetry into the classroom.

Each featured poem includes notes about the inspiration for the poem, a bit about the poet and sometimes poetry-writing tips.

Take a look here

Pompeii Dog

A few years ago, we were lucky enough to travel to Europe and spent two weeks in Italy. One dreary day we boarded a bus for a day trip to Pompeii. After the obligatory (buy something here or we won't let you back on) stops, we arrived at a blue-sky Pompeii. It's an amazing place, but having seen quite a number of ruins we were almost inured to the tragedy that occured here. It was just too hard to fathom, and we were distracted by the glimpses of life, rather than the horror of death.

Then I saw the dog. It was a cast of a dog also preserved by the ash and stone. It wasn't on display really, but in a locked up cage that housed rows and rows of amphora and other artefacts in various states of repair. I wrote about it in my trip diary but also sketched out a poem about the dog. Somehow the dog's obvious agony gave the human tragedy a voice.

The poem, Pompeii Dog has just been accepted by Moving Galleries and will shortly appear in a Melbourne train carriage, to be read by commuters. Fantastic thought that, taking the poetry to the people.