New Poetry by Stuart Barnes

Colour after the car crash

Colour is a basic human need …

like fire and water,
a raw material, indispensable to life

– Fernand Léger

Through Mosman’s veins they pestered them, orange freaks of Krishna,

silver weavings, citrus Fendi glasses,

blister pearls at clavicles, scarlet Prada clutches,

funereal stiff jackets, ‘why the crutches?’

‘Strangely spotted fingers plucked Deliverance’s bluegrass!

We wanted them away from us, their ghastly hues like mirrors’ …’

- Stuart Barnes 2012

Stuart Barnes is arranging the manuscript for his first book of poetry, & writing his first novel. Poems are forthcoming in Southerly Journal, The Warwick Review, & The Weekend Australian Review; an essay – 'Robert Smith: More Than Meets The Lancôme Eye' – will appear in Issue 3 of VLAK: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts. He currently lives in Melbourne.

New Poetry by Phillip Ellis

Ocean Writing

I have been thinking of your name, recently
when I have had the chance, and how it is clear
as a clean glass of water, with the sunlight
unhindered as it emerges through the sides.

You have a specific way of you being
your name, to me, that I would want to whisper
its clarity to the Pacific Ocean
so that it can write it across green shallows.

And those who cross this border of land, water,
on their way to, from, Aotearoa
shall read your name and shall remember your name,
and, like a meme, word will reach you in the end.

You will maybe wonder why it is your name
is written in the shallows of the ocean,
or you will remember me, and you will smile
at a romantic fool beside the waters.

And I'm hoping, at heart, that you will be pleased
enough to investigate this for yourself,
and to look towards the rising sun, foaming
over ocean, lean your head on my shoulder.


- Phillip Ellis 2012

New Poetry by Kathryn Guelcher

Shoes

There was something about

the way you pressed your thumb

on the top of his shoe to check

the size

the way you reached down

sure-handed

blood surfacing and resurfacing

under the nail until

your hand was my father’s.

I was both child and wife-

anticipating and admiring.

Aglow with the warmth of

the fit.

- Kathryn Guelcher 2012

In addition to being a mother of three, Kathryn has been teaching high school English in a suburb outside of Chicago for 12 years.  This is Kathryn’s inaugural publication.

New Poetry by Martin Jervis

Heavy Cold

There are razors white laced

slicing up tomato soup in a gulp.

There are thick whirlpools of glue

stirring up in deep raw bubbling pits.

There are streaky nitric burns deep

burrowing into lake rusty whites

There are senses hung in acid glow

tissue suspended in a film of moment

and I blow my gurgling nose flute

in a trumpet of anaemic yellow.

- Martin Jervis 2012

Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, a great deity cast a line,

Caught word made flesh, created and

Saved all creatures earth bound passage.

Oxygen made if not discovered, chemical

Process plus hydrogen two equals water. Out

Of the primordial soup crawled warm food,

Multiplication and various diets, first cause.

Warmth sucked out, cold imports rushed in

To carve ice statues, misplaced sun, hard

Water kills all tongues. Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

Consoler, Comforter, Jehovah, Spirit of Truth,

Dove, you killed them all, distraught, learned

Complexities of death of creation and creation

Of death, replenish that blue earth, sow seeds.

All things reproduced, land and sea, walked

And swam, tiniest microbe to largest whale,

Fauna, flora, special places beneath the

Corrected sun, left in the hands of Zamiel,

Beelzebub, Sammael, Belial, Lucifer,

Ahrimanes, Mephistopheles, he swore

Never to return to that spinning sphere.

- Martin Jervis 2012

Martin Jervis lives in Leeds, England. His poetry has been published in the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Europe. Spends part of the year in India and has written a series of poems with an Indian theme. Some of his poetry has been translated into Spanish and German. He has also travelled extensively and has a Masters degree in Literature. E-book The Citron House was published in 2007 by White Leaf Press, UK.

New Poetry by Changming Yuan

Confrontations (2): Plum Blossom

Without a single leaf

Green or yellow

To support it as a foil

But on a skeletal twig

Glazed with dark elegies

A bud is blooming, bold and blatant

Like a big drop of blood

As if to challenge, to warm up

The entire season

When whims and wishes

Are all frozen like the landscape

- Changming Yuan 2012

Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman, grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several monographs before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan teaches independently in Vancouver and has poetry appear in nearly 470 literary publications across 19 countries, including Asia Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, SAND and Taj Mahal Review. 

New Poetry by BZ Niditch

NIGHTFALL

Fearsome response
in red green orange
light switching silence
along the salt lick highway
stopping in shadows
a cifer from bloodshot
red eyes sleepless
in the strata, blood and stone
of your nature
by the wave
of your hand and ocean
through revisions
of winding tunnels
of near and far sightedness
in blue random hours
of your narrative
half-speech
passing asylums
prisons
platoons
the lost are never found
seeking cognition
and every idol and star
goes for a swim

- BZ Niditch 2012

BZ Niditch's latest poetry collection is "Lorca at Sevilla" March St Press, North Carolina. USA, avalaible at amazon.com. New poems in Grasslimb,N American Review, Pacific Review,publishes internationally in UK. Au,NZ ,France, Austria,Germany and Japan.

New Poetry by Robert H. Demaree Jr.

LOVE LETTERS

In a box I once thought sealed for good:

Our letters, postmark 1960,

Now naïve, of course,

Florid declarations back and forth

Between college dorms and Army posts,

Embraced by a faint musty dampness

And decaying rubber bands.

Packed away for years,

A hedge against the reach of time,

They have arrived again at a crossroad:

Whether to stay,

Unable to salve the grief they know will come,

Alone, except for the silverfish,

Another forty years,

To entertain our grandsons’ wives;

Or, as we conclude, evidence not needed,

And so to join the accretion of phone bill stubs

And invitations to unremembered showers,

Black bags, in the rain, in the curbside archive.  

- Robert H. Demaree Jr. 2012

Robert Demaree is the author of four collections of poems, including Mileposts, published October 2009 by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives five months of the year. He has had over 550 poems published or accepted by 125 periodicals, including the 2008 and 2010 Poet's Guide to New Hampshire. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com

Iron and Wine

The political poem died a sorry death in the Anglosphere some years back, during the so-called Poetry Wars of the 1980's and 1990's. In one of those cruel ironies rampant in academia, it would appear that the instant politics began to dominate the running of the faculty board, political poetry lost much of its potency. The broader public, as it happens, turn to poetry for clarity, at times even salvation, but not self-serving polemic. 

As David Biespiel put it so succinctly in an article in Poetry a couple of years back (an article I have cited before in Bluepepper), the public have come to feel ".....excluded, unconcerned, and dismissed because they believe that American (read Anglosphere) poetry has become so esoteric that figuring out the differences among the warring poets is...unecessary...." (David Biespiel, This Land is our Land, Poetry May 2010).

Now I was a tender strapping acned thing during the "wars", but I have a sneaking suspicion that much of the "warring" was in fact spurred on, not by strong ideological conviction, but by the fast-diminishing opportunities for poets to pursue their vocation under the inexorable drive of corporate rationalisation in the publishing world.

Most readers of Bluepepper will have grown up in this world and will have trouble fathoming the sense of injustice and outrage with which our predecessors greeted this harsh new reality. In such an environment most were happy to point the finger while few, too few, remained comfortable with the idea of raising a hand. Sinecures were at stake. Thus the political poem quickly became the domain of the feckless and unhinged, rust-throated relics of a bygone era.

There are, of course, great political poems that endure because they go to the very essence of what it means to be human. The East Europeans turned it into an art form, as did the Enlightenment English, but Pablo Neruda (with due apologies to my friend Margie Cronin) seems to me to sum up the general failing of political poetry in that he is either a great poet or a seductive polemicist, but never both at once. Vallejo could be at times, or the Catalan poet Estelles. Some but not so many. Perhaps in large part because the mistrust many people bring to poetry they bring doubly to the political poem.

Blame Plato if it makes you feel better.

Of course I am speaking as an Australian. An avowedly Euro-centric Australian, but an Australian nonetheless. We are perhaps the least prone to seduction by honeyed rhetoric, more impressed by Cicero's courage than his eloquence, and those who decry the absence of the Great Orator in this country are blind, I believe, to one of our greatest strengths. But then perhaps I am beginning  to show my age.

The West Australian/Cambridge poet, John Kinsella, would appear to differ with me on this as on so much else (earnest and sardonic being as oil to water), for he has published yet another stridently political poem in the Spectrum pages of this weekend's Sydney Morning Herald (18/02/2012). Titled "Penillion of the Iron Ore Eaters", the poem is an embarrassment that should never have left the beer coaster on which I suspect it was penned. It labours under the kind of tortured rhyming scheme I remember with an ache between my eyes from open mic night at the Sandringham Hotel, circa 1996. This combined with its utterly incoherent train of thought (surely the death-knell of any political poem?) will do absolutely nothing to help preserve the pristine Pilbara coast currently so hard-pressed by the mining boom. It may even prove counter-productive, both to the poet and to his cause, by re-enforcing an attitude abroad since the Poetry Wars that poets long ago lost all right to a fair hearing.

New Poetry by Richard Hillman

aside

for Alicia

someone said that lovers saunter

and i’m trying to imagine that

with difficulty – it is late

and we need to get home

and the car headlights

make out shifting shapes

beside the old road

in this dark we expect something

will jump out at us

i feel your hand resting

on my thigh

as i ease on the brakes

going into the bends

you tell me you’re sick

of these half-lit trees

that you need out

of this darkness

and i suggest stopping

somewhere

perhaps parking

on the ridge

overlooking town

i find the turn easily

but we don’t saunter

beneath the stars

because the backseat

barely has room for two

- Richard Hillman 2012

Richard lives in Wauchope, NSW, where he runs creative writing workshops from time to time. He has had several poetry collections/chapbooks published, including Timber Country (Picaro Press) and Raw Nerve (Puncher & Wattmann). His poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, in print and online magazines. Richard has been a recipient of SA Arts and Commonwealth grants for his writing.

New Poetry by Maurice Devitt

Street Song

Step on a line

you marry

the devil

no longer

to savour

the candyfloss

of grace -

instead

the check-list

of sins,

the first

confession

an easy choice

between murder

and omission,

the craving

to beard

the bogeyman,

loosely

imprisoned

in an upstairs room,

the curious

keyhole of mascara,

the too-loose clip

of his mother’s shoes

and in the corner

a wireless

playing

all the best tunes.

- Maurice Devitt 2012

Lost Earring

Did it fall

as you took off

your coat and how

did you notice?

The sudden

slight imbalance

a pin-prick

of air or fingers

expecting

the confidence

of silver

only to feel

the lobe of a baby

untarnished

by the script

of borrowed

beauty?

Spurred

by the curiosity

of distance

and lust

I saw it

quite quickly

in the drunken

shadow of my chair

but demurred

wanting the search

to last forever

- Maurice Devitt 2012

A student at Mater Dei in Dublin, Ireland, Maurice is reading for an MA in Poetry Studies. Short-listed in 2011 for both the Fish Poetry prize and the Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition, and runner-up in the Phizzfest poetry competition, he has had poems accepted by Abridged, Moloch, Paraxis, Weary Blues, #firstcut, Boyneberries, Stony Thursday and Smiths Knoll and is working towards a first collection.

New Poetry by Matthew Davies

DEAR GIMLET-EYED

If your tongue would wobble a bit more,
you’ll have more history
to be silent over.

- Matthew Davies 2012

SHORTCUTS

He changed the dirty sheets
To change his dirty mind

He emptied the ashtray
To quit smoking

He scrubbed away the nicotine stain
To recreate his youth

He did the dishes
To force discipline

He blew his brains out

To find a heaven

- Matthew Davies 2012

Matthew John Davies is a writer from Brisbane. He has been published 

in Cottonmouth, Page Seventeen and the latest Skive Magazine. He blogs at

 theundersizedshadow.blogspot.com

RIP Peter Spencer Lowe (1926-2012)

My father and my friend, soft and contrary as a Sydney autumn.

New Poetry by William Wright Harris

Ode on an Egg

Jungian theory of

Universal Archetypes;

an egg symbolizing

fertility for a

small tribe in

Africa, for Sioux

Nation. Every culture

has a flood myth

and vampire lore-

dragons, serpents, worms.

The blonde hair of

Freya and Aphrodite-

The beards of Tyr

and Ares, pointing

towards war-

Symbolism of all

creation, frying in a

pan, on my stove.

- William Wright Harris 2012

 Ode on a Chicken Pot Pie

Reading Bukowski

is like

eating a Chicken Pot Pie.

American lamentations,

the sore muscles from

working fourteen hours a day

six days a week

under

the hot California sun

are the chicken.

The sauce is race track poems-

gambling in their

drunken

loneliness again.

Peas, carrots, and

other vegetables

and

spices are the

references to Tchaikovsky,

Pound, Van Gogh.

Those honest chinaski

poems the cooked flour and egg

baked into a crust

Word by word

page for page

bite by bite

on the end of a fork.

- William Wright Harris 2012

William's poetry has appeared in seven countries in such literary journals as The Cannon’s Mouth, Ascent Aspirations, and Write On!!! He is a student at the University of Tennessee- Knoxville, where I have been lucky enough to study poetry in workshop settings with such poets as Jesse Janeshek, Marilyn Kallet, Arthur Smith, and Marcel Brouwers.

Come Celebrate

COME & CELEBRATE LANGUAGE

On Sunday 5th February, 2:30 PM you are invited to a gathering with the

launch of five titles:

AU/UA Contemporary Poetry of Ukraine & Australia

Les Wicks - Shadows of the Read

Paul Cliff – Vanuatu Moon: prose poems –Books 1 & 2

Les Wicks - Barking Wings

at

the Friend in Hand Hotel

58 Cowper St, Glebe

upstairs bar

2.30pm

*

AU/UA Contemporary Poetry of

Ukraine & Australia

This e-book is the first collection of contemporary poetry from both countries in both languages accompanied by rich photography. Exchanges between our two dynamic cultures are yet to fully develop & this work is an important step in that process. Work includes some of both nations’ leading writers plus some younger voices.

The title can be downloaded freely at:

http://meusepress.tripod.com/AUUA.pdf

http://issuu.com/meusepress/docs/auua

http://krokbooks.com/ebooks/krokbooks.com_auua.pdf

ISBN 978-966-2362-84-8

Published by Krok Books in association with Meuse Press.

The anthology will be launched by Prof. Marko Pavlyshyn. Bilingual reading of poems on the day. Unique opportunity to hear a great old language from a young country.

Yummy Ukrainian snacks will be provided.

Event generously sponsored by Ukrainian Studies Foundation in Australia
and Ukrainian Council of NSW.

*

Also available is Les Wicks’ Shadows of the Read – a chapbook of poetry in Ukrainian & English by Krok Books.

*

Paul Cliff – Vanuatu Moon: prose poems Books 1 and 2.

Cliff's wry and observant take on Vanuatu, in two booklets (chapbooks). His fourth (and fifth) published volumes of poetry.
Another great title from PressPress. $9.90 each

*

Les Wicks - Barking Wings

Wicks’ 10^th book is full of feathers, life, shadow & laughter. Beguiling language, a bam-bam-bam of image is all underpinned by a core accessibility that invites you in...”

$9.90 published by PressPress

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Should you be unable to attend copies of the books can be purchased.

Paul Cliff's books are available from: http://www.wellsprungproductions.com.au/PressPress/PressPress_Home.html

Les Wicks' Barking Wings is available from:

http://www.wellsprungproductions.com.au/PressPress/PressPress_Home.html

or from the poet's homepage

http://leswicks.tripod.com/books.htm . Shadows of the Read can also be ordered here