Wild Grapes: Australian Poetry

Song of the Rain

Night,
and the yellow pleasure of candle-light....
old brown books and the kind, fine face of the clock
fogged in the veils of the fire - it's cuddling tock.

The cat,
greening her eyes on the flame-litten mat;
wickedly, wakeful she yawns at the rain bending the roses over the pane,
and a bird in my heart begins to sing
over and over the same sweet thing--

Safe in the house with my boyhood's love
and our children asleep in the attic above.

Hugh McCrae

South Australian poet rob walker has just released micromacro , a collection of quirky poems based on rob’s unique perspective on the world.

“Daytime teacher and night-time poet” rob walker has had his poems published widely in poetry journals, anthologies, websites and other media in Australia and overseas, including Best Australian Poems 2005 (ed. Les Murray), ABC radio’s poeticA, the CD Going Down Swinging #23 and a collection sparrow in an airport, (Friendly Street NEW POETS TEN.) In 2005 he co-edited THIRTY, Friendly Street Poets’ Thirtieth annual poetry anthology. He teaches music and drama at Woodcroft Primary School and lives in Cherry Gardens with his wife and “one and a half of his three children.”

“These poems are the pick of my work over the past 3-4 years” says rob. The collection’s a kind of continuous macrozoom on subjects from molecules to millipedes to animals, including the human ones. There’s social and political commentary, my emotional response to kids I’ve taught – and, I hope, humour. Poetry shouldn’t be academic. It should be accessible to all.”

rob walker’s micromacro has already won the City of Onkaparinga’s inaugural 2006 Poetry Unhinged Prize for the Best Single Collection of a local poet. Along with Seaview Press, Salmat and the SA Writers’ Centre, Onkaparinga helped to finance publication of the book.

Other SA poets have been generous with their praise for the collection.

Mike Ladd, poet and presenter of ABC Radio National’s poeticA says "Whether he’s focussing on the minute worlds of insects or big political themes, rob walker’s poetry is witty, incisive and nicely attuned to the ‘mouthfeel’ of language. His black sense of humour is a bonus.”

Prolific local poet Graham Rowlands adds “walker grabs you by the scruff of the neck and pulls you up through a chemical mosaic of earth and ocean until you confront your earliest evolutionary ancestors. Then there are insects, spiders, birds, cats – and the human race. Are people any better than the earlier life forms, the poet asks. In reply he reserves much of his compassion for the young and the old caught in a – web? – of political and commercial institutions. In a variety of old and new forms, walker finds a wide range of subjects variously eliciting his wit, concern, outrage or empathy. He achieves memorable poems through a combination of startling visual imagery and a dialogue with language itself.”

Jan Owen, the Aldinga writer whose poetry and work in Creative Writing education has taken her to many cities of the world has the final word:

“rob walker combines sharp perception, compassion and humour to create crisp intersections of time and place. Airy shortcuts, sensuous imagery, and a warm sympathy combine in poems that range from insect life to human relationships, from landscape to love.”

micromacro is available online from http://seaviewpress.com.au or direct from the poet at http://www.users.bigpond.com/robwalker1

Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her

If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.

For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.

Christopher Brennan

Quantum Quirk

Ten thousand miles away
another continent
a different life
the push pull effect is still clear
weird action at a distance
Einstein called it
quantum quirk
we're neither together nor apart
your cut hurts my finger
your failure breaks my heart.

In the quantum world of our
drifted lives
entanglement between us remains
giving mass to my
insubstantial body.

Your face is foggy
with time and distance
the downward draw of gravity
distorting the image
in our mutual mirrors.

Beyond the melting edges of the present
our tiny lives are frozen
in quantum
superposition
love-not love
both here and there
mine and not mine
alive forever and
already dead.

© Magdalena Ball, (originally published in <http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/quarkindex.htm> QuarkSoup / Picaro Press, September, 2006)

Dreams

I have been dreaming all a summer day
Of rare and dainty poems I would write;
Love-lyrics delicate as lilac-scent,
Soft idylls woven of wind, and flower, and stream,
And songs and sonnets carven in fine gold.

The day is fading and the dusk is cold;
Out of the skies has gone the opal gleam,
Out of my heart has passed the high intent
Into the shadow of the falling night--
Must all my dreams in darkness pass away?

I have been dreaming all a summer day:
Shall I go dreaming so until Life's light
Fades in Death's dusk, and all my days are spent?
Ah, what am I the dreamer but a dream!
The day is fading and the dusk is cold.

My songs and sonnets carven in fine gold
Have faded from me with the last day-beam
That purple lustre to the sea-line lent,
And flushed the clouds with rose and chrysolite,
So days and dreams in darkness pass away.

I have been dreaming all a summer day
Of songs and sonnets carven in fine gold;
But all my dreams in darkness pass away
The day is fading, and the dusk is cold.

Victor Daley

a forty nine year old child sees his first bumblebee
kew gardens, march 2003

surely this is nature's joke?
aerodynamic enigma

fat tumbling furball of
black mohair mumbling

sotto lobby
of delegates.

it disappears into a
crocus (there! suck i!)

soundz the hazard
buzzer, reversez

is this for real?!
MMMMM…. it repliezzz

waddling off through air in
its woollen tigers Guernsey

© rob walker, (originally published in sparrow in an airport, New Poets Ten, Friendly Street / Wakefield Press, March, 2005)

Weeping
willows are black
against the dark and far
horizon. Silhouettes are fair,
and strange.