Poetry Archives | Giramondo Publishing

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Poetry

She said to him, When a woman informs you that she’s a little drunk / this is actually a warning that she’s liable to collapse at any moment. / And when she tells you of a lost happiness / she means that you’re responsible for giving it back to her / on a silver platter, like those knights in the stories of Caliphs / who return home with the heads of enemies on their spears.

my understanding of a nation is not abstract/ if america did not let off Ezra Pound/ it would not tolerate me/ no! I am not satisfied with my own country/ but that does not mean that I shall love america

standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in / the hieroglyphics of grubby little hands pieces of antique chairs hang / that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old coach,

I was writing a long and labyrinthine poem in which I opened up / and at the same time stepped into that openness, stillness, with a white voice

Nobody in Rome cares / that I have begun / to devour you. / In the hostel this morning / and again tonight. / Even on the basilica stairs / while the nuns pray inside.

All night my father hangs upside down / in the hospital basement / trapped under the huge pulsing bell / of a crystal jellyfish...

Four poems – ‘Pied Butcher Bird Flute Solo’, ‘Brush Turkey In the Cold Room’, ‘Death of a Cat’, and ‘Praise and Its Shadow’ – by Robert Adamson, a poet of the Hawkesbury River.

It comes back to me that I married K. because he whistled Bach perfectly – that was, as I remember, the reason I gave myself and others. It’s as good a basis as any for marriage and I was not disappointed.

Two poems – 'Night of Electrical storm' and 'Night of Poverty' – by Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassabova.

Xi Chuan ('Western River') is the poetic nom-de-plume of Li Jun. Born in 1963 in Jiangsu, he grew up mainly in Beijing and published his first collection of poems in 1991.

A major work by anthologist and award-winning New Zealand poet, Jenny Bornholdt.

Four poems by Tomaž Šalamun, translated from the Slovene by the author and Christopher Merrill.

A sequence of five love poems by the poet, novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Luke Davies.

A sequence of poems by Emma Lew: 'Snow Gold', 'My Illusion of the Tycoon' and 'Jasmine'.

In 2003 B. R. Dionysius received an unexpected tax debt thanks to a literary grant that didn’t factor in HECS repayments.

Even as I uncover materials that suggest Renate’s appearance – a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features – she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can’t be retrieved.