Sydney poet, Tricia Dearborn, and myself will be reading at Smith’s Alternative in Canberra on Monday, 29 April 2019. Smith’s is a great venue for poetry and the event gets underway around 7pm.

Tricia will be launching her third full-length collection of poetry, Autobiochemistry, published by University of Western Australia Publishing. The book will be launched by Sarah Rice. Here’s a sample of Tricia’s writing:

 

[15] Phosphorus

At school I volunteer
to set the lab stockroom in order.
Sealed in a navy lab coat

I take inventory.
Gather for disposal
crumbling samples, mystery

solutions. Rewrite acid-rotted labels.
Re-pickle a funnel-web.
Marvel at copper’s rosy gleam.

Dust the jar of white phosphorus,
a sullen chunk
stored underwater,

forcibly tamed. In time
I will escape into the air,
go up in flames.

 

I’ll be reading a selection of my longer poems plus some haiku from Blowing Up Balloons: baby poems for parents (Red Moon Press), which I co-wrote with Vanessa Proctor. Here’s a poem of mine:

 

The Sandpiper

I have flown
a wide open ocean
where waves break
and boil like crested
terns in a rookery
I have flown
a sweeping plain
where grasses sway
on the breeze like a school
of silver mackerel

I am a lone sandpiper
   patrolling
an empty shoreline
perhaps a thousand miles
from any I know
   wondering
can this bank of wind
swept sand keep me safe
from the memory
of your watery embrace

 

Smith’s Alternative is a strong supporter of poetry in the Capital Region, with poetry readings held every Monday evening. If you’re in, or around, Canberra next Monday (29 April 2019) then please come along and join us for an entertaining night of poetry.