‘Grace Can Pour’ is the first poem of Asterion (November 2026), Amy Crutchfield’s first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with The Cyprian in 2024.

Grace Can Pour

into a person.
Athena does this to Odysseus
in Phaeacia, in Ithaca
but we do not need a goddess
for this to take place.
She only helps us understand

what is already within us.
I can pour grace
into you: make you taller, younger, more formidable.
See your hair, it flows down in curls like hyacinth petals.
The years of trial and shipwreck
I have wiped them away.

Amy Crutchfield reflects on Asterion (November 2026), her first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with The Cyprian. The book’s title derives from the lesser-known name of the Minotaur, a hybrid figure from Greek mythology both human and monstrous, which roughly translates into ‘the starry one’.

‘And the queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion.’
Apollodorus: Bibliothecha, III, I

‘The House of Asterion’, Borges’ short story about the Minotaur, begins with this quote from the Greek scholar Apollodorus. At less than two pages, the story’s brevity belies its breadth and its potency. For it, and the myth from which it springs, speak of inclusion and exclusion; brutality and humanity; the pure and the impure; suffering and redemption; love and lust; and life and death. The story also makes a fundamental point about the power of names. A number of similar ideas underlie poems in this collection.

Half-man, half-bull, the Minotaur’s terrible reputation was something I had known about for as long as I could remember, but not his name – Asterion – which is luminous and hopeful. Was this because his birth name had been regularly elided from a tradition busy establishing the Minotaur as a figure universally reviled?

The power of naming is central to Borges’ story. He isn’t alone in centring the act of naming. In his Epilogue, while also praying for ‘the grace of accuracy’, Robert Lowell warns us ‘to give / each figure in the photograph / its living name’. 

The grace of accuracy is a desirable aim in itself, but to strive for such accuracy is also actively to avoid the harms of inaccuracy, which could encompass anything from confusion and misnomer through to injurious silences and deceit. This collection is interested in ‘living name[s]’ and, more generally, the words we choose and the consequences of our choices.

Pairs, poles, opposites, couples, crossings, lovers, hybridity – the book is replete with twos. Oppositions provide an inherent tension, but they also give rise to the fertile ground of paradox, and to the idea of the pharmakon: poison and remedy in one. Is love the ultimate pharmakon? 

The poems stem from a curiosity about human interaction: about how we treat each other, in private and in public; about the the ways we hurt, and sometimes endeavour to heal, each other and ourselves; and about what we glean in the process. 

Borges’ story casts doubt on Asterion’s dangerous reputation. Several poems in this collection also seek to unsettle our image of him. Whatever Asterion’s culpability, he is one who is utterly excluded, and the result, in Borges’ telling, is that when confronted with Theseus’ lethal blade, this fearsome creature, ‘scarcely defended himself’.

A poem from Askew by Andy Jackson (October 2026), his first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Human Looking.

Weathering

you begin to suspect you are already stone
each day a weight that does not shift with rest
with time alone or a fistful of supplements

                    thoughts become rubble, then a puff of dust
                    but the job offers keep coming, requests
                    for support, for words with heft or heat

as you sleep, a pebble drops into your chest
by day, random avalanches in your actual heart
a sedimentary need to be prone, quiescent

          it hurts to mineralise, a constant furnace and settling
          your only life hack, chronic endurance
          your five-year plan, the welcoming of moss

not trending or even relevant but weathering
because stones, you know, don’t lack feelings
they absorb them, are pure compressed existence

                    it’s a gift and a theft, this falling into earth
                    let it all accrete – work, memory, healing
                    life, seismic, is building your resume of loss
                    this slow erosion, your bedrock callin

Andy Jackson reflects on Askew (October 2026), his first poetry collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Following his exploration of disability and deformity in Human Looking, the poems in Askew widen the lens, to feel their way into the impairments of our ecologies and our dialogues.

These poems arrived gradually out of a range of things I noticed and experienced over the last five years. The way people looked at you when you wore a face mask, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic first arrived. How the Goldfields, Dja Dja Wurrung country, where I live, can seem both devastated and strong. The sudden, unexpected death of a dear friend. How increasingly hard it seemed for people to listen to perspectives and griefs other than their own, especially online. The arrival in my body of various mysterious health issues. The bushfires that came within a few miles of our house.

At some point, it began to dawn on me that all these poems had fatigue in their bones. My fatigue, from the genetic condition I have, and the chronic illness I’ve been recently diagnosed with, is a fundamental constraint not only on my energy, but my creativity and being. 

Yet part of this exhaustion, this feeling not-quite-right, is also shared, is political and existential. None of us can entirely ignore the ongoing ecological crises, wars and conflicts, violences both intimate and global. This too feels chronic, an elegy unfurling into the future. No wonder writing often felt beyond my capacity. 

Yet, even before I was conscious of it, I sensed that constraint might hold some quiet, unexpected potential. Fatigue had me burrowing deep to find some well of rest and persistence, as well as burrowing outward to find community and a measure of groundedness.

I’m fortunate to have the benefit of an array of trusted collaborators, friends and colleagues, and a loving partner. In their creative essaying, I found rungs to climb, energies to be energised by. I wrote ekphrastically, in conversation and collaboration, and in response to poets whose writing embodies new ways of being masculine, of being human and sensitive. 

I also wrote many of these poems under formal constraint, using pre-existing poetic forms but also inventing new forms, such as the aftersongs, where the final word of each line is sourced from albums by musicians and composers who had died in the last five years. All these constraints dredged up movements and motifs I didn’t expect.

With all this in mind, many of these poems test out what it might mean to say ‘you’ or ‘we’ in a poem, instead of just ‘I’. The collection is also ordered so that each poem includes a word from the poem before it, a kind of ecological stitching.

That’s not to say Askew is entirely orderly. There are threads here that don’t obviously connect, that are frayed. The fabric, after all, is off-kilter. 

Andy Jackson
3 July 2026

Read three excerpts from Autobiography of a Marguerite by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle (April 2026), a new edition of the author’s acclaimed 2014 debut. An innovative book-length poem about chronic illness, familial dysfunction and the discovery of a sense of self, the book is published alongside Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s new collection, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama.

Excerpt: p.6

My mother stands in the garden. She says, I can’t hear you. She says, is this a weed or not. The phone rings and it’s for my mother, but she won’t come inside, so I stand in for her. Is this a weed or not, she says, holding up the blistered plant.

We package ourselves to the doctor. I have symptoms, and what’s more, I have signs. What are your symptoms, the doctor asks me. Her symptoms are X, Y, Z, my mother answers.

Excerpt: p.7

(during the early afternoon) She was in the garden, inventing a harvest (corn, wheat), flooding, shaking, radius. (My sister needs glasses, my sister gets headaches, seizures.) Frowning camera. Jumping from the tree, self-timer. (Therefore I want glasses, seizures.) I get stomach pains if I am around people too long (a few hours). Hopeless natural waste kernel. Aggressive bird. What kind of pains do you get? Oak tree pains. (When I was a girl, I jumped from the oak tree repeatedly, trying to break a leg.)

Excerpt: p.18

Last time I was here I filled in a form, or maybe I filled it out. I hate forms. After last time, I formed an opinion. I cannot articulate the opinion, but I know I formed one. On a scale of one to ten, I can never just pick one number. On a scale of one to then. The doctor is looking at my form. I nod and smile when she says something I don’t hear. On the desk is a packet of ‘non-sterile’ latex gloves. She leans closer to me, pointing at the form. So, when rating your progress, from the choices of: quicker than expected, as expected, and slower than expected, you circled my progress is slower than I expected. Why did you circle that?

I don’t know. Because I’m still in pain, because I noticed improvement before and now I don’t? I look at my watch, but I’m not wearing a watch. The doctor says, Sure, but, is progress slower than you expected or slower than you hoped?

Lisa Gorton reflects on Mirror Landscape (1 May 2026), a major collection of new and selected poems by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet. The new poems focus on mirrors and landscapes as they are employed by the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, with a particular fascination for the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.

‘The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’, said Walter Pater in 1873. ‘She had simply become an incubus,’ said art critic Bernard Berenson. ‘Glad to be rid of her,’ he added, when the painting was stolen in 1911. Duchamp scrawled a moustache across her face, wrote L.H.O.O.Q. on his photograph of it – sounding out the words ‘elle a chaud au cul’ (‘her arse is on heat’). In his essay Why they attack the Mona Lisa, Salvador Dali argued it was because she looked like a mother – only she ‘smiled ambiguously’. ‘The world’s most famous painting’, says the Louvre website now.

I wanted to rediscover this portrait of a woman who has the look of someone looking, not being looked at. Over six years I wrote the title poem ‘Mirror Landscape’. The poem works across a gap, like that gap between a mirror and its landscape. On one side of it is history. On the other, invention; and each side can be read without the other. The long poem is also mirrored in a sequence of prose poems, ‘Speaking Shadows’. I was thinking about art’s relationship to power, reflecting on Leonardo da Vinci’s last days in Rome, working with mirrors and their distorted perspectives under Giuliano de’ Medici’s patronage.

In my years looking at this painting, I discovered a heraldic device hidden in shadows inside its landscape. That heraldic language was once as familiar as company branding is now. But the language of heraldry is lost; now that device presents itself as a little anomaly, a strangely dark curlicue of shadow in that vast landscape at her back. Anyone can open one of the Louvre’s photographs of the painting and see it for themselves.

This device was the personal emblem of Leonardo’s last Italian patron, Giuliano de’ Medici. Giuliano adopted it late in 1512; it marked his return to Florence after eighteen years of exile. In 1513 his brother, recently elected pope, called Giuliano to Rome and handed Florence to their nephew. So, this device signals that the picture in the Louvre belongs to those few months when Giuliano led Florence.

This confirms an eyewitness account of the picture. In October 1517 a cardinal and his secretary went to visit Leonardo in his studio. Leonardo was old, his right arm was paralysed, he had a pension from the king of France. The cardinal’s secretary was keeping a diary. He copied down what the old artist said. The artist showed three paintings: the patron saints of Florence, John the Baptist and St. Anne, and a commission from ‘the late Magnifico, Giuliano’: ‘una certa donna Fiorentina, facta di naturale’. ‘A certain Florentine woman, painted from life’. Or, ‘a certain female Florentia, painted from life’.

Marking when the portrait was painted and why, this little device challenges old assumptions about who it is looking out at us from the bullet-proof glass, and smiling—

Read an excerpt from Mirror Landscape: New and Selected Poems (May 2026), a major collection by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet Lisa Gorton. ‘Apocrypha’ is from a new series of poems by Gorton called Caesars, which reflects her fascination with the perspectives of space and time, and the ways in which memory and landscape, the past and the future, fold in and out of each other.

Mary Magdalene, desirous of sovereign contemplation,
sought a right sharp desert—
and abode there by the space of thirty years—

At midday a gong sounds, the sea
turns on its side and I see my cloud
coming from a long way off to feed me—
stately and vague, slipping easily across the mirror-
like distance dividing there from here,
filling the cave with its damp
down feathers each one made of that fine-
ground marble light sinks into until I
lie myself down in the fullness of stone—
Stone tongue in a stone mouth
speaking only in the carving of my hair, stopped 
gestures of my hands—

Sleeping and waking, there and here. Only, 
after so long, it gets confusing.
Which is which? For instance, the dead woman
left on a mountain—that is written.
Yes. She slept in stone under a mantle, suckling
the wordless child who had seen nobody—
this child feeding stones to the sea, the sea 
mumbling over them, raw-gummed,
spitting out that fine-ground marble that scuds
the top of the sea, making
statues of horses, statues of gulls, bringing its 
hammer down on them repeatedly—

What happened to the child, I’d like to know?
I think he’s still there
throwing his stones to the sea. Each time I
sleep the sea sucks back leaving such
ranks of statues—No, leaving the one statue repeating 
as far as the eye can see—One
by one, night by night, it walks towards me
and its right eye is my right eye,
forgetful as a mirror. One by one it stops,
pinches a strand of my hair, eases my
death a little way out from my skull, this
long gold hair I walk around in. Pelt.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle reflects on Autobiography of a Marguerite, her debut poetry book re-released by Giramondo (April 2026) in which she explores chronic illness, familial dysfunction and the discovery of a sense of self. The book is published simultaneously with her new collection, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama, and follows her popular novella, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

I began thinking about this book in 2011, when I was working on another manuscript (Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama) and studying life writing and autobiography at the University of Auckland. Reading and thinking about George Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood and My Life by Lyn Hejinian were important precursors to working on Autobiography of a Marguerite. In 2012, I was enrolled in the Master of Creative Writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington. My thesis intention was to write an innovative autobiography about family and illness, and that became Autobiography of a Marguerite. 

I developed a chronic inflammatory illness at age 14, which has affected and continues to affect my day-to-day life. I did not get to have a normal teenage experience of partying or hanging out with friends, instead I was worrying about how and when my body would further deteriorate, whether I’d lose my eyesight or my ability to walk, what side effects medications would have, and whether I’d be able to achieve any of my future goals and dreams. I spent a lot of time at medical appointments and at home, bored and depressed. 

In writing the book, however, I did not want to write about a journey of my particular specific illness, rather I wanted to explore the social aspect of illness in relation to identity and family, and I wanted to use illness as a concept, to illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, tying it in with a relationship where the daughter struggles to separate herself from her mother. And in order to write this book, in particular the middle section, I decided to follow the writing advice of ‘write as if your parents are dead.’ My mother was not pleased when she found out her name was in the title of the book. Before it came out, whenever people asked her about it, she pretended to forget the name.

As with Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama, I was interested in the idea that we subconsciously choose to be ill because it fulfils certain internal needs. In a family system where co-dependency and enmeshment are present (diminished boundaries and diminished sense of agency) I believe autoimmune disease is likely to develop. The immune system is a boundary between you and the outside world, and the first task of the immune system is distinguishing self from non-self. Modern medicine describes autoimmunity as the immune being unable to distinguish between self and non-self and begins to attack its own tissues. To me, autoimmunity is a response to repressed agency and repressed anger, and the body pointing to the need for boundaries – physical, emotional, spiritual. In the book, it is often difficult to distinguish the narrator from her mother. The mother’s past affects the daughter in the present, and the daughter’s present affects the mother’s concept of the past. ‘It is not even a story… The happening is still happening… We are not ill, but needy…’

I wanted to use illness as a concept, to illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle reflects on her new book of poetry, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama (April 2026), a collection of prose poems which explore the relationship between thinking patterns and ill health. The book is published simultaneously with the re-release of her debut collection, Autobiography of a Marguerite, and follows her popular novella, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

Although this book appears as my third publication, I actually wrote it in 2011, when I was 20. I was studying English and Psychology at the University of Auckland. I had an intention to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML (Wellington, NZ) the year after, and wanted to make sure I could complete a book on my own first, outside of a writing workshop programme. I completed the manuscript in only a few months, and I remember listening to The Beatles’ album Revolver on repeat on my CD player while working on it in my mother’s bedroom, where the computer was (I didn’t have a laptop). It has been strange revisiting these poems almost 15 years after they were first composed. In a way it feels like a posthumous publication.

At the time, I had become sick of writing lyric poems and wanted to try something different. Taking inspiration from Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and Lyn Hejinian’s ‘The Rejection of Closure’, (and her book, My Life) I wanted to use parataxis and non-linearity in the book to subvert traditional narrative and lyric expectations. There are many ways for a reader to step into the room of each poem; each sentence can be a complete story on its own, as well as coming into play with preceding and following sentences, and with the larger narrative framework of the paragraph. In contrast to regular prose, the sentences are written and arranged to decrease syllogistic movement and increase polysemy, leading to ‘gaps’ in which the reader must bring their own beliefs/experiences. 

The prose poems focus on cycles of belief, life scripts, anxiety and disease (dis-ease). The book takes ideas from psychology theories (such as transactional analysis), and metaphysical theories of illness, attempting to explore the way we chose ‘life scripts’ for ourselves from messages we internalise from others at a young age. Each poem creates resonances with other poems as the book develops (most noticeably in the use of specific repeated phrases).

At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured. My own experience with chronic illness led me to holistic approaches that highlighted the link between the mind and body. My mother had a copy of You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, and this book became an important part of how I related to my illness, as well as being an influence on my writing. Hay’s philosophy is built on the foundation that our thoughts shape our reality, and negative thought patterns could lead to emotional and physical suffering. In Love Your Disease: It’s Keeping You Healthy, (another influential self-help book for me), John Harrison posits that disease is not the result of external forces but rather a subconscious choice, a way of getting our needs met – needs such as attention, love, respite, or even the affirmation that the world is dangerous/unsafe. ‘If you have no need of major illness’, Harrison wrote, ‘you will have no major illness.’ This is controversial idea, which many people find threatening, although these days books like The Body Keeps the Score have become mainstream, and we have evidence-based correlations between adverse childhood experiences and the likelihood of developing autoimmune disease. My first published book, Autobiography of a Marguerite, written a year later, further explores these themes, and I see Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama as its companion.

At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured.

Eunice Andrada won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The ceremony was livestreamed by The Wheeler Centre. Watch Eunice’s acceptance speech and read the transcript below.

Thank you so much to the judges for recognising my craft with this award. Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida – a woman branded the ‘antagonist’; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story. I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness, in her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making. But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to work with and within language as a Filipina writer.  

Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to instead platform others who have been writing about our lives and our bodies for far too long. I come from a lineage of women who could not write their story themselves because they were too busy raising children on their own as the matriarchs of their families. I am deeply grateful for the love and creativity and imagination with which they raised me. Because it takes so much creativity and imagination to figure out how to survive while raising a big family while having little material means.

I want to thank my mother Dinna, my grandmother, my legion of aunts, and my three sisters – to whom I dedicated this book – thank you. I also want to thank my publisher, Giramondo, and the entire team, for all the care and the work you’ve put into my books. Thank you to the poets in this category, I’m so honoured to be beside you. To the poet Gloria Demillo, who is with me tonight and has been with me since we were both 16, writing poems for poetry slams – thank you.  And finally, thank you to the community of poets who have raised me up for many years, especially to my mentor, Merlinda Bobis, who guided me in the creation of KONTRA. I owe this award to all of you.

Eunice Andrada has won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The announcement was made at a ceremony on Thursday 25 February at The Wheeler Centre.

‘Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida, a woman branded as the antagonist; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story,’ says Andrada in her acceptance speech. ‘I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness and her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making.’

‘But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to write with and within language as a Filipino writer. Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to platform others who have written about our lives and our bodies for far too long.’

Read the judges’ report:

KONTRA is an exquisite work of precision. Here awakens an astonishing poetics of dissidence, decadence and eroticism. The kontrabida, a Filipino soap opera villain, is invoked in the many afterlives of violence. By inhabiting the persona of opposition, the poet exhumes another self from the ruins of rape and empire in shifting temporalities. From Renaissance paintings to polyphonic choral voices, Andrada binds lucid and ethereal images together in vivid scenes, imaginatively pulling infinite futures from fracture. Each line is visually palpable and thematically resonant, cutting fertile ground for mutual possibilities of desire and resistance. At once tender and defiant, KONTRA is a testament to lyrical mastery. 

Eunice Andrada’s first collection Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021) gained several honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Stella Prize, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. 

Also shortlisted for this year’s VPLA for Poetry was Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan. Watch a livestream of the awards ceremony below.

The following 16 haikus are from the four sections that comprise For the Seasons by Beverley Farmer, a collection rediscovered by Lyn Jacobs following the author’s death in 2018, and published by Giramondo in 2026.

For the days of spring (p.3)

The lighthouse in fog:
a windmill of quiet sails
with the light in them.

One day grey and gold,
the next: beaded all over –
white, green – the plum boughs.

Tread lightly and we
will no more break the sand crust
than these gulls, these shells.

Night disembodies
a lighthouse of black stone, but
for the rolling eye.

For the days of summer (p.38)

Windy white petals
caught on spears of marram grass:
seagull featherdown.

The hanks of weed and
the brown shadows and the sun’s
interbraiding chains.

Sun-warm bodies of
water loll in the rocks and
shine like jellyfish.

Half sunk, green and scrawled
and bubbled, cold all over,
I am twice my size.

For the days of autumn (p.53)

Inrush of the tide,
of the fractured light and wind
flattening the weed.

The rise of the tide
swamps the tepid shallows with
new cold deep water.

Now he knows the sea,
how it swallows and spews out
the beach twice a day.

Heaped high, a yellow
quilt of sand on a new grave
there in the half dark.

For the days of winter (p.76)

Steady wingbeats of
the rowboats homing. Dark trees
mirror the river.

This grass has a pearl
sheen of dew like the opaque
swift flank of a fish.

No moon, just the stars
on the white sand, the milky
way, the sea’s loose edge.

Like hands, the last brown
fig leaves as they curl up cold
fingers in the rain.

The following is an excerpt from Lyn Jacobs’s introduction to For the Seasons: Haikus by Beverley Farmer (1 February 2026). Jacobs, a scholar and critic, rediscovered the manuscript of poems after Farmer’s death in 2018.

The publication of Beverley Farmer’s sequence of haikus, For the Seasons, is a rare gift. It is the first time her sustained meditation, in the form of three hundred and sixty-five haikus, in tribute to the days of the year and the distinctive features of its four seasons, has been published in full. 

[…] After her death in 2018, when assisting Beverley’s son Taki to gather material for the website he was creating to commemorate his mother’s legacy, I discovered that he was unaware of the haiku manuscript. It was no longer on computers and after a frantic search I located my copy in an old box of research papers and postcards from Beverley’s travels around the world, secured only by a rusty paper clip. I rushed to the local library to digitise it and return it to Taki’s grateful stewardship. 

Though Beverley sent me the sequence in 1999, I cannot confirm the timeline of its production as a record of daily events, or as the end product of a longer gestation. The individual haikus with their precise economy of expression unfold like slowed time-lapse photography recording diurnal and seasonal transformations of seascapes and landscapes, plants, birds, animals, people and objects. The closely observed changes in place and weather conditions have the immediacy and sustained concentration of a diary record. I have no doubt that if Beverley had set herself the task of writing one haiku a day she was sufficiently disciplined to do so. I know she meticulously kept notebooks (a methodology that gave rise to the powerful insights of A Body of Water) and that it was her custom to work and walk daily when possible. Often the colours, textures, light effects and details of sensory and sensual experience are witnessed as if seen in transit. There are variations of focus and subtle shifts in the dialectical negotiations between self and the loved locations of Point Lonsdale and Swan Bay. In a 1992 paper for a ‘Women and Reading’ seminar in Canberra titled ‘Journeys’ Beverley spoke of ‘the rhythm of the stride’ in language, citing Osip Mandelstam ‘writing his poems in his head while walking’. Given my own experience of Beverley’s exhaustive creative practice I am equally sure that scrupulous self-editing took place to achieve the coherence of design manifest in this collection. 

[…] The sequence of haiku which composes For the Seasons respects Japanese traditions, acknowledging kigo (seasonal reference), the kireji (ellipsis or dash marking rhythmic divisions), and a succinct focus on the essential qualities of things (sono mama – to represent ‘as it is’). Sharply contrasting images are juxtaposed, without expressed connection, to surprise or redirect perception. Despite the recurrence of motifs (the tideline, the cliffs, the lighthouse, the sea, sky, rockpools and selected animals and plants) there is little repetition in the charted terrain of house, garden and the local environs.

[…] In her poetry, intimate reflection does not negate the sense of the world getting on with its business. Beverley had a passionate capacity both to reimagine large myths and to delight in small things. I miss her intelligence, wit and wisdom. It is a solace that her insights continue to be shared through her published books.

‘Beverley had a passionate capacity both to reimagine large myths and to delight in small things. I miss her intelligence, wit and wisdom. It is a solace that her insights continue to be shared through her published books.’

Ender Başkan reflects on Two Hundred Million Musketeers (1 November 2025), a debut collection by an award-winning poet that explores the complexities of new parenthood and family life, and anxieties about the future his children will grow up in.

I returned to writing poems when our first child was learning to talk. Language, sounds and words were fun again. We sung each other to sleep. Mumbo jumbo and jibber-jabber filled our home. I’d published a novel and thought the best bits were where I was riffing like that – freewheeling. I found joy transgressing language codes and rules, writing dadaist postcards and letters and leaving madcap voice messages for my friends. Elegant long sentences were eluding me. We were being broken open. I was not making sense, common sense, but I was connecting to some sensibility that felt true to me. The child’s world away from the tyranny of capitalist logic. It was lockdown in Melbourne and I picked up an old novel manuscript I’d spent five years working on to see if I could salvage it. I couldn’t. 

Around this time my friend and teacher Ania Walwicz passed away and I spent a couple of weeks between jobs packing up her apartment. We used to meet up regularly and our chats would start with discussion of the latest big atrocity, political fiasco or bureaucratic nightmare. Eventually we would talk about writing. Poets, like kids, like animals, know when something’s off. She was a great poet and sifting through and studying her books and papers I got to be with her inner world. Reflecting on her poet’s life I asked myself what my practice and work could look like.

As a new parent I was struggling to get to my desk. To write I believed I had to accumulate time but really what I had to accumulate was language. So writing became inseparable from language, anywhere anytime, bits and pieces. As I hung the laundry or pushed the pram I was writing, jotting a word here, a line there, voice memos, no big ideas just fabric. The poem would sneak up on me and open up like a horizon.

One night late at the bookshop my colleague Justin picked up a David Attenborough book and read aloud a line I remember as two hundred million years, beneath here and that got me worked up, not only in the poetic sense of geological time and the compression of rock and mud I’d been reading about in books with my kids, but the rhythm of that phrase. For the rest of the night I was playing with it – two hundred million years / cheers / fears / beers / weirs… At home Sophie got involved and conjured ‘two hundred million musketeers!’ Yes! I yelled. It’s in the last poem of the collection and I chose it as the title of the book.

Elegant long sentences were eluding me. We were being broken open.

The following poem is from 51 Alterities (August 2025), Keri Glastonbury’s first collection since her acclaimed Newcastle Sonnets.

Grace Yee reflects on her second book Joss: A History (1 June 2025). Her first book was Chinese Fish, which was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2024, as well as other prestigious literary awards in Australia and New Zealand.

The first poems in Joss: A History evolved from experiments with extracts from books about China written in the 19th century through to the early 20th century. I have long been enamoured with the English language of this period, and fascinated with how it sanitised, prettified and thereby advanced colonialist-orientalist ideologies and projects. The writing is so beguiling. I played with very short extracts: inserting them into and alongside extracts of my own (21st century) writing to see what, if anything, ‘took’. By the time the State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship opportunity came along, I decided to focus most of the work on settler Chinese history in Australia, something I’d been interested in exploring for some time.

As with Chinese Fish, I was motivated by a strong conviction that the past persists in the present. While researching (for Joss: A History) I found that published histories, particularly prior to the era of digitised texts and the Internet, had an unyielding quality about them, a strong aura of authority and last-word closure. When I cut into these histories and played with fragments – text, images, voices – across different time-zones to draft some of the poems, my goal was not to enliven or re-narrate the past but rather, to consider the impact of the past in the present, how it ‘breathes’ there. Stories about past events are very much alive: their energy charges our ‘nows’, and this becomes apparent when they are unsettled from their usual contexts.

Joss is a polyphonic work that accommodates multiple voices and perspectives: it’s a narrative collage that integrates colonialist-orientalist and settler Chinese stories and perspectives. The collection wrangles with well-known tropes: early Chinese settlers characterised as gold diggers, opium addicts, market gardeners, Chinatown cooks and furniture-makers, their bound-feet wives and head-down daughters, all of whom lived on ‘the smell of an oily rag’ and ‘took away the profits from everyone else’. Stories like these have been entrenched in the lore of white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the mid-19^th century, and the othering, exoticising sentiments that undergird them have endured to the present day. Joss is interested in how settler Chinese and their descendants responded to the hegemonic force of these narratives and why the stories they continue to seed remain so pertinent.

My goal was not to enliven or re-narrate the past but rather, to consider the impact of the past in the present, how it ‘breathes’ there.