c-side

Jane has introduced me to the wonders of American poet Louise Glück through her collected First Five Books of Poems (Carcanet), which as the title suggests collects in their entirety her first five books.

There is such a marvelous sense of control and understatement at play in these works, especially the earlier pieces. My favourite of the collection is her 1975 book, The House on Marshland, where she reduces her poetry to long flowing sentences that are both evocative and elusive at the same time.

I trawled the web and found one of my favourites:

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence
and the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

– Louise Glück

SOURCE: Poemhunter.com

The 2008 Australian Poetry Festival State of Play gets underway tonight with a cocktail party followed by a weekend of poetry seminars, discussions and readings, as well as a few book launches.

You can get all the information you need at the Poets Union website.

The critic and academic Peter Pierce has written ‘this is — unflamboyantly — one of the richest periods in the meandering, controversial story of Australian poetry.’

As a title, State of Play: Australian Poetry Now! is a reflection of that opinion. As a festival, it has been designed as an exploration of that idea. The central festival panel is the most obvious expression of this intent. Parallel panels have been sponsored in Melbourne and Perth and a similar one has already been successfully conducted at the Sydney Writers Festival. The papers from these panels, and from other festival events, will be published in a special double edition of Five Bells which will appear early in 2009. We hope this will be a serious contribution to thinking about Australian poetry.

- Brook Emery, 2008 Festival Director

In the city of New Eridu, deep in the lands of The Homeless Gods, three more locations are unlocked for you to visit: THE ZIGGURAT, APSU MARSHES and GATES OF ANZU.

The Gates of Anzu are the portal to the fortified city at the heart of New Eridu, carved with the image of the lion-headed eagle Anzu - who once stole the Tablets of Destiny.

Within the fortified city lies The Ziggurat. This towering structure is home to the rulers of the city. But it is only a shadow of its predecessor, the grand ziggurat at Ur.

Meanwhile, on the fringes of the city, in the alien environment of the Apsu Marshes (named after the ancient father of the gods Apsu - He of the sweet, fresh waters beneath the earth), two lovers live out the last days of their relationship.

Visit The Homeless Gods: www.thehomelessgods.net

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Newly opened are the gates of New Eridu, in the lands of The Homeless Gods. Here dwell the fallen gods of Mesopotamia.

This poem-world takes the form of an interactive flash animation map, an interface akin to adventure games such as Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

www.thehomelessgods.net

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Giramando Publishing

This month on c-side we feature Picnic, the new collection from veteran poetess Fay Zwicky. Zwicky has been publishing since the 1970s and Picnic is her 6th book of poems. These are poems presented with the moral certainty and concern for humanist values for which she has been renowned. There is also the continuation of the oriental themes she began exploring with her work on Hokusai, most notably through the politically-charged sequence, ‘The Terracotta Army at Xi’an’.

While many of the poems in the collection are longer pieces which we didn’t feel were suitable for reproduction here on c-side, the two we have selected, ‘The Duck-Herd’s Night Off’ and ‘’No Return’, should give readers some feel for the collection as a whole.

Picnic can be purchased directly from the ever-industrious (and award-winning) Giramando Publishing.
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