New Poetry by Matt McAlpine

Light Spots

Seminal fluids,
frogs marching sideways
to the pond. 
In the trees sing song
birds unseen the air
brazen in the hum
of the forest,
a small boy sits
in the mud by the pond
watching frogs hopping
under water, since
perturbed by amphibious dance
the water stills
and there, a small boy 
sits himself
cast in the shadow of the sky,
muddy hair boy watching,
boy watching frogs
laughing here, the boy
in the mud hears the trees
singing shaded by the canopy above,
casting sunlight sprinkling
pepper-spots across the dust
rays amidst the jealous
trees aside boy,
streaming light across 
the trees and smiling pond. 


- Matt McAlpine 2019

Matt McAlpine is a 21 year-old poet from the Blue Mountains, Australia. He is currently working on his first book of poetry Views from the Mountaintop. 

 

New Poetry by Les Wicks

Cooking Up Down Farm

Under my guidance
apples slice the sun into child sized segments
which cool on the loosebark kitchen shelf.
The lawn offered to help 
though passionfruit vines were dismissive — thought 
who works when you’re busy with Beauty?

Down here in my dustbowl
where I grow the crop.

On the basalt balcony I make resolutions
to be “successful” while calling home
to my dead parents every Thursday.
The lilli pilli drops berries
which I mistake for accolades.
The sugar gliders will eat well tonight
while I don’t mind.

Tried aw shucks
it didn’t take.
I love youse all was flowery
but the fruits turned bitter.

Don’t tell me all those locusts are psychological,
I ate one once
as you do
just to be sure.

One has to plough
but too deep & biome is destroyed.
Too shallow the seeds gasp.
I was eaten once,
someone had to be sure.


- Les Wicks 2019

Les Wicks has toured widely and seen publication in over 350 different magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 29 countries in 15 languages. His 14th book of poetry is Belief (Flying Islands, 2019). http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

New Poetry by Bharti Bansal

Lost Identity

There is a bird nest near my window
Everyday the mother goes around flying 
To find a little worm to feed its babies 
And I watch from inside
The world which builds itself around my home
Every dawn at 5 
And goes to sleep when the dusk meet the dying sun
I try to be the bird too
Imitating voices of the little sparrow
Because it's easy losing identity
Like throwing the sea shells back into the sea
And watch the waves jostle and take them to the new shore 
Where a kid awaits to hold them and listen to the little voices trapped inside.
I have become more layered over the years
As moon waxes and wanes with the shade of my skin
And the sea rises with each breath I take
I am the mother who has listened enough to the cries of her infant 
To differentiate between the pain and hunger
But I have never been the one to fly
So I build my wings from the rags of the thatched roof of my home
And take a leap of faith from the terrace 
Only to find that sometimes winds dictate the choreography of falling bodies
I let the wind decide
Where I crash
Like the mother sparrow 
Who didn't return home one day in the winds
So I kept making voices just to let the little sparrows know
That their nest will always be the womb 
A safety drenching their hearts
Because you see lost identities are stuck to the rear of the trees
Shouting
Screaming 
Ululating out loud how their skin melted to the ground 
And horizons stood knocking at their doors
To gift them the lost light of the fading sun
But when none returned
The trees became the ghost graveyards 
Standing large with their branches hanging over the fences of the decaying bones
And when the night comes
The sparrows learn to fly by themselves
Sometimes after all the generations that never bade a goodbye to handwritten customs
It's better not to become 
Same as father or mother
Sometimes it's better to leave home
And fly across the naked skies
Just to find that the most one can get through vulnerability is not death
But the fear of sailing too far to the place of no return
And when that happens
Know not to look back 
To the ancestors who demand pain to be felt
I know this because
The little birdies made a choice after their mother died
They don't return anymore after they flew far away one day
To the place where identities aren't lost
To the place where they knew there mother would have wanted them to be
And I am happy
Because I too have learnt to fly.


- Bharti Bansal 2019


Bharti Bansal is a 21 year old poet from India. She has been published in four different Indian anthologies and wishes to write her own book someday.

New Poetry by Judith Nangala Crispin

Elegy for a Thylacine in the National Museum

The last known thylacine, a female named ‘Benjamin’,died alone in her cage at Beaumaris Zoo, on September 7, 1936. She had frozen to death– the zoo keeper having forgotten to put her inside for the night. Her body was thrown into a rubbish bin.

All the others are gone, erased¬–
their slanted gaits, their pelts banded fire
and venus blood.
They are erased–and nothing left of them
now but names: Ghost Tiger
Wurrawana, Corinna.
They will not come again,
come eddying over grasslands,
star-stippled, will not
leap, rock to rock, or stop
in a clearing behind the houses,
rotate an ear in some gigantic night,

in all the sounds of those black hours–
waking pardalotes,
quolls return to wild shadow,
galaxies carried on their backs.
At dawn, the alpenglow
will flood a country without thylacines–
over Cradle Mountain, a new sun
lifts over conifers like hackles.
How many days has she paced
this perimeter fence?
At dusk the zoo keeper moves her inside,
into a box, a place of straw
and concrete, light spills under a door.
Dead light.

She is a hooded falcon, sees only
this leaden interior. In the late watches
she presses her head against the wall,
listening for storms, for the ice winds
to founder in across the snowfields,
bringing the scent of pines.

She remembers needles
blackening into snowbearing clouds.
And her memory is a vein extending
over this whole landscape, a story repeated
so often it distorts to ripples, murmurs,
something running on its toes like a fox,
and what remains are only
cadavers hanging in a tree,
pelts nailed to a woolshed door.
In tussock weighted with weed,
she is hidden– her shape barred in barred light.
The zoo keeper’s eye passes over so easily.
Floodlights in the enclosures go out.
The buildings darken. Wire fences
are harps in the jaw of wind.

She emerges into the yard,
winterbright, and the night raining stars¬–
Lupus, Sirius, the constellations of her life.
In that cold living air,
her breath hangs
clouds.

They found her frozen in grass,
in hoarfrost,
white on white–
just something dead in a cage.
And later, locked in their houses at night,
with their skinning blades, with their fear,
their hunger to own everything,
they will say she was not the last.

Someone found a tooth on the escarpment,
a scrap of fur against the sound barrier
of some new freeway.
And while they speak
the ash of thylacines will drift over cities and roads,
the wasteland of industrial farms,
and find no place to settle.


- Judith Nangala Crispin 2019

Judith Nangala Crispin is a Bpangerang poet and artist living near Lake George. She has two published collections of poetry "The Myrrh-Bearers" and "The Lumen Seed", and is currently Poetry Editor of The Canberra Times. 

New Poetry by James Walton

I play the perfect cover drive

Easing on to my back foot
Saturday early early Summer, elevenish
a sound of cork like popping
the axe fall of linseeded willow
throughout the mowing suburbs

My spine straight as a lithe picket
Plane trees shady stalled on shutter
a mottled reminisce of Cazneaux
our border/kelpie Sophie
trotting back the drooly ball

Her jet coat a reel
in stoppled light from Van Gogh’s head
a thwack in the fence holding on
the still of tactile breeze
my children, Shot, wanker, 

can we have lunch


- James Walton 2019

James Walton is an Australian poet published in many anthologies, newspapers, and journals. He is the author of three collections, the latest being 'Unstill Mosaics'. He lives in Wonthaggi, Gippsland, in a Federation house, which was once a maternity hospital. 

MAUNSELL WICKES GALLERY OPENS AN EXHIBITION CELEBRATING  WOMEN’S CONNECTION TO COUNTRY: JUNO GEMES, JUDITH NANGALA CRISPIN, ANA POLLAK, ON SEPTEMBER 17

Sydney, September 4 2019: For immediate release

A new exhibition at Maunsell Wickes Gallery will feature the work of three Australian women artists with deep connections to Country. Gallery Director Dominic Maunsell has brought these artists together in order to underscore the fragility and beauty of our natural landscape, and the importance of women’s voices in Australian culture. The exhibition will present Judith Nangala Crispin’s Lumachrome Glass Prints honouring fallen animals and birds, Juno Gemes’s photographs of life on the Hawkesbury River and Ana Pollak’s sculptures reflecting the myriad natural forms on Dangar Island. The work will be on display from September 17-October 5, 2019.

Judith Nangala Crispin is an artist and poet of Bpangerang descent. Her lumachrome glass prints are deeply rooted in the practice of honouring fallen animals and birds. Judith’s materials are drawn from the landscape­–cadavers, ochres, sticks, grass and leaves­. Exposed 24 to 40 hours in natural sunlight, this body of work is a genuine collaboration with Country. Her work is “layered with intellectual and spiritual meaning . . . the images are in an active relationship with the environment to which she is responding. Her images tell, and are made from, stories: of her family roots, the lives and culture of her people, and of the living things that are part of her physical process.” (James Burnett – MONK art and the soul | an imaginarium, Spring 2019).

Photographer Juno Gemes has spent four decades documenting the Aboriginal resistance in Australia. Her current exhibition features work from her book “The Language of Oysters” written with her poet husband Robert Adamson. These images are a quiet account of their life together on the Hawkesbury River. Gemes’s work, much of which is held in national institutions, has been a major contribution to Australian photography and a lasting historical record. “Artist-photographer Juno Gemes’s lifelong consideration and love for the land and its peoples is present in all her work. It is also an affirmation of an active female presence in the landscape and the character of the photographer behind all her work. This exhibition of a photographer with a ‘loving eye’ offers a rich and engaging experience” (Rod Pattenden – The Australian, 9th May 2019).

Dobell Prize winner Ana Pollak works in sculpture, drawing and film. Her work has  grown out of her love for the environment and Chinese calligraphy, focusing on the huge range of textures and lines in the Hawkesbury sandstone country where she lives. Ana Pollak’s sculptures are made with the twigs from the Blackbutt forest on Dangar Island. As in the marks and structures made by birds, animals and insects her work. The comparable work of birds, animals and insects “points to the universality of Ana’s expression. It reaches from the devastation of war-torn Europe across the Australian isle to our Asian future”. (Tony Twigg, SLOT, January 2018). 

Contact information:

Maunsell Wickes at Barry Stern Galleries

19 Glenmore Rd, Paddington NSW 2021 Sydney

Director Dominic Maunsell

mw_art@bigpond.net.au

T: 61 2 9331 4676

F: 61 2 9380 8485

Judith Nangala Crispin

jmcrispin@gmail.com

Artist, Juno Gemes, jmgemes@gmail.com

Artist, Ana Pollak, anapollak@hotmail.com