The list in alphabetical order is:

Emily Ballou, The Darwin Poems

Steven Carroll, The Lost Life

Eva Hornung, Dog Boy

Cate Kennedy, The World Beneath

David Malouf, Ransom

“Hope is the expectant eye.

looking to distant object, brightened

& moistened by emotion,–…

Expression of affection

is accompanied by slight

protrusion of lips

as if

going to say

‘my dear,’

just what smile is to laugh.–”

“Polly died.

All the sons arrived.”

For anybody who doesn’t know, Polly was Darwin’s favorite dog in his latter years. She was a white terrier that slept in Darwin’s study and accompanied him on his daily ’sandwalk’. Apparently, she died the day after Darwin did, something I have previously never read about. If I had managed to discover this earlier, I would have called the poem: April 20th, 1882 and placed it after “The Green Need” and before “Afterwards”, which is an account of Emma’s life after Darwin’s death. What perfect brevity and rhythm Emma’s words have.

However…the stanzas in the version Ryan sent me were alternating tabulations across the page of mostly four lines each and I have tried eight times to not only reproduce the tabulations but to just put the stanza breaks in, but this blog will simply not let me add spaces between stanzas (though I have done it before and have no idea how I did!). This is a frustrated poet this morning…Ryan I’m very sorry because all the stanzas have been run on together.

If anybody knows how to better reproduce poems on these blogs, I’d appreciate any tips…

The Apartment

Our new walls,

empty in the dusk,

hang like sheets

before first light.

There is a driven nail

by the stove that could

hold a pan if the walls

stay sturdy. And the

old tenants left a mirror in the

bedroom which looks back at

staring walls with fine cracks

like a museum’s basement vase.

There are brown smears

in the study; chocolate, blood

or shit, we don’t know what

will happen to us here or what

will settle on rented walls

or if nothing will settle

at all. We’ve just moved

and already we are bitter

cranberries in each other’s

mouths, biting about photos,

the place of the table, lay

of the bed. The apartment is a City

Hall we cannot fight. So we turn

like lawyers, against each other,

let  the walls stare. There is a mirror

to look into, a nail to hang onto.

Our unopened boxes hide in corners

and closets like beaten children.

And we will take the blood

off the walls and the dust

from the shelves. We have one

year together in a place that

is empty at dusk, and feels like fog

inside and between us

so I cannot see you, and Christ,

tomorrow, we will live here.

I hadn’t been back to Australia in eight months at the time and flew straight in from the UK. While I was overwhelmed to be back in my heartland, writing a poem in three days with cameras following me was an unexpectedly daunting task and I nearly failed, having jet-lag, insomnia and a good deal of writers’ block. Nevertheless, I managed to write a poem in those three days that I am proud of.

The program launched on Dec 29th, 2009 and continues. My episode screened on January 12th, 2010 and can be downloaded free from the ABC TV website for anybody in Australia, for the next 27 days or so. The entire series can be watched this way and if you are quick, you can still download the first two episodes for another couple of weeks I think.

I will also be reading next Wednesday Oct 28th at 7:30 at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh with Australian poet Alison Croggon. Please come along.

There’s also an upcoming ABC radio program (ABC’s The Book Show) recorded during the Melbourne Writers’ Festival of a session I participated in along with Bernhard Schlink, Anne Michaels (she of the wonderous books), Christos Tsiolkas, Andrea Goldsmith and Ian Buruma. The session was called “Pain, Pleasure, Poetry and The Body.” I read three Emily Dickinson poems (‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ and I’ve been feeling it ever since; in fact, I can’t seem to get rid of the ‘beating’ beating’ of Dickinson’s verse) and a few days later, I had a chat with the radio presenter Sarah L’Estrange, about how poetry inhabits the body and we talked a bit about Darwin too, of course!

I loved hearing Anne Michaels read Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Plums’, Andrea Goldsmith read an Anne Sexton poem, Christos Tsiolkas read some Nina Cassian and Ian Buruma read Auden. Then we all closed with a short excerpt from Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’. It was a gorgeous session.