A ute erupts from gravel skid, / no match for the drunken / matador who slaps the bonnet // off his hip.

Even The Darkest Hour Lasts Only / Sixty Minutes says the billboard / at the Moss Vale Church

The poem at this point might have headed // nowhere, or in various directions, but settled / in a carpark cum beergarden

Fruit machines accept all cards for very punter / there’s an addict doorframed, they punctuate the street / as in a Florence gallery when restorers airbrush out / aureole and child to foreground areolae puckered / for remedial teething, too pure or too stoned / for lewdness

What I am about to tell you is the truth. I witnessed it with my own eyes; and I am a reliable person. I have often been complimented on my reliability. I have won awards. I would not have obtained my present job – as the senior public relations officer for a respectable company that makes chemicals and plastics – if I did not appear to be trustworthy and believable.

We wait in air-conditioning watching the pilot / of Lost in Space. There’s no Dr Smith / just wholesome cowboys wandering a moral maze, / dressing monkeys as aliens and killing Cyclops.

In interviews, when I mention that one of my favourite short-story writers is Hemingway, invariably there is an awkward pause, and often a bemused reaction. Surely I would name someone more fashionable: Alice Munro, maybe, or Lorrie Moore. My reply is always that Hemingway’s best work is important because he crafted a style and tone that approximated his ongoing themes and subject matter. For that alone he is worth reading.

For some, and I’d venture that with poets it is more than ‘one-fourth’, lithium does involve losing these times of heightened artistic facility and productivity. Of course many poets have no affective illness, and many who do find lithium works for them, but if Shelley had lived under a medical absolutism that insisted all manic-depressives should be on lithium, he may never have said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.

The man lay along / the woman’s back. / The girl stroked the slip / from faceless starts / to uncertain ends / and found a word / that softened her inside.

Of the several New Zealand poetry books which I have looked at recently, the most interesting are those which have set about exploring the spaces that constitute and reconfigure ideas of home. Perhaps it’s not without coincidence that these books are written by women, as women might be more readily inclined to define themselves in relation to family and kin, and through the occupation and management of domestic space. Certainly, for all these poets, family is a central focussing force, and integral to the idea of ‘home’.

The problem with a question is that it implies its own answer. The problem with an answer that it responds to a question. But the question that rejects its own answer? The answer that will not fit its question? The memory of the tidal flats about Mont St Michel, and in the fields beyond them the stands of trees, ranked, silver in the winter light, like fragments of roads long washed away, or that never came, answers to a question no-one ever got around to asking.

Simone couldn’t read Englishmen. Men of any nationality for that matter. Andrew was relatively simple. Always happy to be enthusiastic about Simone, provided she was enthusiastic about him. Otherwise, bets were off. Now Simone found herself with mixed feelings. Big Ken would disappoint her if he made a pass, yet she would be equally disappointed if his obvious attraction to her wasn’t charged with the man’s characteristic hunger.

(Yes Petal, something’s afoot, just don’t even guess, right? / And I’ll offer an explanation, tomorrow, over a nice hot cup of tea / how This may seem ‘unnatural’ but it’s sure natural to me.)

It is said there was a moment / in the dock, / when her back was up against it, / she pointed the finger at him / to save her own, thieving skin.

Peter, of the stone, / in the crucible of dread / reduced to sulphur; / acid, ashes, stench.

Behind the blue-green agate of her eyes / is the knowledge she protects / even as she dissembles.

I asked my father about Lil, when I came back to Australia. When I came back from the grey city, from the city of ghostly marriages, after I left George. I asked my father about Lil because I remembered the stories he told us, and her poems that he read to us when we were kids.

It’s the core this time, / the spine’s steps of bone / its mats of muscle, their tenderness / my pattern for this time.

In the Western, the frontier represents not an absence of law but a zone of heightened conflict between radically different, even opposed conceptions of law: between positive law, or the dictates of civil society, on the one hand, and natural law, a higher but unwritten code of moral authority, on the other. This ideological frontier between positive law and natural law is seminal to the Western, where it is patrolled by figures whose position is defined in relation to law; usually the lawman, and his alter ego the outlaw, or occasionally by someone who conflates both roles.

Thanks to Gra-Gra the planet knows your patch: / ‘Here’s Nola,’ he grins, ‘our girl from Woop Woop West.’

Since everything old is always turning neo: g’day Peter (this is Alan, chum, / songwriter manqué, author of these stanzas)…future Oz icon from Fitzroy through to Freo,/ with bodytalk more pirouette than scrum

After church the drive, the singsong: Dad in tenor mode / winds the Vauxhall down Mount Dandenong Rd.; / lulled, Mum’s glad, these patterns still keep: / Janet reading, Carol pulling faces, Margie asleep.

Yes she loathed Scotland, but wants to return. For all that’s crass- / cum-tragic must pay out with happiness

I hadn’t become anonymous; I had been given a new, ready-made identity, a mass-produced garment which sticks to the skin. It wasn’t so much anonymity as a stereotype; blind substitution rather than white page. As my aeroplane entered British airspace and thundered through the London sky, the nationality of my passport had billowed out and, like a mild but chronic illness, had colonised a small corner of my life.

When I looked back, I saw their bodies, stick men on the shore, and I also saw Corky gawking at me over an expanse of weeds or brush, away from my parents, like an evil character from a picture book. I kept paddling, imagining myself a sort of female Viking with a horned hat, my blonde hair flying in the breeze. My arm muscles and back felt good. Plop, stroke, feather (drip); plop, stroke, feather.

I want to cut the flowers / I wrote to you about / in intimate, intimated, detail, / the pleated red poppies, / their intortions

under its glitz a fairy light, / silver white in this blackness, / fractured, defused. / All these stars make my head go back.

Lived in a boot. / Hand-made calf-skin, fitted dead snug. / Rolled down tongue so it was open-top. / Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t know where to knock. / Not hundred per cent waterproof but good enough. / Drank beer over garden wall of ankle cuff. / Lived in a boot.

Outside in the courtyard sun, / the blocks stamp down with a heartbeat’s / square and wooden emphasis.

mantress of a sapphire on your finger, which / like a Mapplethorpe flower entreats / the most exquisite sexualness from stillness

The frost in a diamond remembers / the spiralling porcupine spines / of a snowstorm falling at me…

the thunder like a low surf / hunches over the roof / on haunches, / like a storm man with his arms around a child.

I dream of the first cherry of summer. I give it to her and she puts it in her mouth, looks at me with warm, sinful eyes, as she possesses the flesh. Suddenly, she kisses me and gives it back to me with her tongue. And I’m hers forever, the cherry stone rolling up and down the keyboard of my teeth all day long like a wild, musical note.

After a decade of absence it’s the crumbling / facades that strike me – chunks of paint split off / like states on the map of former Yugoslavia. / In the tenement flats everyone is spring cleaning – / tapestries, quilts, rugs, expel the odours of winter months.

and finds himself yet again / at some river’s edge, not knowing / what has happened in between / only that the moon has risen / water lapping at his knees.

I’ve left all my belongings, all that resembles me behind: / the cat’s needy meow, your callused grip on my hand; / I’ve left the blocked pipe, the poinciana in the yard / whose roots threaten like the unspoken between us.

A thousand dormant thoughts, chrysalids of gloom, / softly stirring in the shadowy room

Outside, a red balloon and a white, / let up into the crown of the end umbrella, / are kissing the canvas, / philosophers latched to Being.

So on a Tuesday morning Jacob left his breakfast half-eaten and went out in his school uniform and sat there in the red dirt giving the old dog a hug. Later that morning Geoff and I went in the truck to Whyalla to take Poco to the vet and to see his father Mr Mills, who was slowly dying of cancer at home. Poco sat beside me on my flannelette shirt, so happy at the privilege of riding in the front instead of on the back tray.

Above all other obstacles, it was fear that had held me back in surfing and later, kept me out of the water. Fear of failure, fear of being an imposter, fear of being out of control. All these fears coalesced in the tell-tale corrugations of a big set looming out the back, that unstoppable phalanx of pure, liquid energy from which there was no escape.

peerage / his body a paradigm / of tattoo husbandry he / glowers on the street dreaming / himself to be an award / winning website hawks

Boxing is indivisible from the marketing machinery which surrounds it, just as the art world, the literary world or the world of pop music contain within themselves both the nobility of the enterprise and the crassness of its exploitation. Indeed their nobility is framed within and defined by the structure of reward and recognition bestowed by their respective milieus.

The rain was merely a gauze, a softening of the early autumn air, but now and again Ruth saw a young mother dart out from her avidly talking group to bend over her child, to pull up and settle a hood of yellow, scarlet, or cobalt blue.

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