Turning lyrics inside out and backward, hope kissing rust, heavy butterflies, and a ditch of a brain … read on to enjoy these and other wonderful turns of phrase I lapped up from the poems I read from January to June 2019.

Hiss and spit

Rae Armantrout says: ‘you can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another’. According to critic Stephanie Burt, ‘William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Armantrout how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out and backwards … to become one of the most recognisable, and one of the best, poets of her generation.’ In Apartment Armantrout writes,

The woman on the mantel, / who doesn’t much resemble me, / is holding a chainsaw / away from her body, / with a shocked smile, / while an undiscovered tumour / squats on her kidney. 

 Silvers

I love the whimsy of Night garden by Catherine Skipper.

At night the giraffe from my garden dances / the moon silvers
his neck and his eyes shine with tears / long legs leap
and lollop, he sings to the moon / as she glides across the dark floor of the sky / she envies him his dream of grace.

Catherine Skipper reviews drama and dance for the South Sydney Herald where this poem was published in March 2019. She is also curator for the Orchard Gallery in Waterloo. She began her fictionalised biography, Signs of Flight, as a way of ‘disembedding’ her memories of growing up in the ’40s and renewing the future.

Slippage and scarves

Brigit Pegeen Kelly was one of America’s most strikingly original contemporary poets. Her later work explores the slippage between fact and fantasy. According to Carl Phillips, in the world of Kelly’s poems there is an ‘otherworldly resistance to so-called rational thinking’. Doing Laundry on Sunday conjures a floaty weekend feeling,

for the hands that pressed them first /as bulbs into the earth. / Bread, too, cools on the sill, // and finches scatter bees / by the Shell Station where a boy / in blue denim watches oil / spread in phosphorescent scarves / over the cement.

 Lulls between carnage

The massacre in a mosque in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, was the worst mass shooting by a lone gunman in New Zealand. A Poet Sits Down to Write After a Massacre was written about a massacre in a synagogue in Pennsylvania in October 2018. It begins,

The dead keep piling up and all I have are poems to wrap them in.’ It ends, ‘cover my eyes with verses / if you must. Bribe the ferryman with curses and dust. / A poet’s contract is blood-inked, bone-stamped, / ratified eternal at the frontier where hope kisses rust.

We need this poem by US poet Matt Hohner, which won this year’s Doolin poetry competition in Ireland. Thresholds and Other Poems, Hohner’s first full-length book, was published in 2018.

 Quick question, short answer

I recently listened to a fascinating Poetry Foundation podcast about John Ashbery’s The Short Answer. Ashbery wrote thousands of poems and this one from later in his life is a cracker.

How was your trip? Oh I didn’t last / you see, folded over like the margin / of a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and / what have we come to? A paper-thin past, / just so, and ‘tis pity. We regurgitate /

The poem’s published in Quick Question (2012), one of his later collections. Others include Girls on the Run (1999), Chinese Whispers (2002), Where Shall I Wander? (2005), A Worldly Country (2007), Breezeway (2015), and Commotion of the Birds (2016).

Dusting the body

Claire Gaskin has been publishing poetry and teaching writing since the 1980s. Here are some lines from Ismene’s Thirst

I dusted my brother’s body / the dandelions nod affirmation / the butterfly heavy with the want does not land // the day I went to get results / my notebook opened an incision / lay lined / an inky river // the little boy runs into / my failure of ground /

 Ella O’Keefe says that, in Paperweight, Gaskin’s full-length collection published in 2013, the poet ‘shows her talent for observing fluctuations in the state of things – personal, political and environmental. Within this, she does not turn from the darker corners of the human psyche.’

Phantom you

Barbara Guest rose to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of an informal group of writers known as the New York school of poets whose membership included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler. Their innovative approach to poetry was influenced by modern art, especially surrealism and abstract expressionism. Here are some lines from Barrels.

Just as she steps toward it / and makes for the cup, / I’ll see phantom you / and what you were / brought up by the sea. // And scraps of paper / from this ditch of my brain / will float on the water / and choke her.

Take my ear

Eloise Grills’ comics, essays, criticism, memoir, photography, illustrations and poetry have been published widely in journals in Australia and abroad. She recently signed a two-book deal with Brow Books. Her debut poetry collection, If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams is published by Subbed In. I love these lines from Vincent and the Four Seasons.

You are never lonely so long as part / of you is with someone else / Now take my ear so that I can’t / hear your leaves rustling / then the silence / as your / winter sets in

The waves

US poet Joshua Beckman is the author of Things Are Happening (1998), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Award, and several other collections. John Deming commented in Coldfront magazine: ‘Beckman’s traditionally a master at converting the personal to the existential in a deceptively plain-spoken way.’ These lines are from [The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett].

The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. / I’m sad. I make horrible sentences. / A woman alone in the park waves. The water. / The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. / Put down the cell phone. I’m sad. The waves.

 Wooden anger

Emma Lew (born 1962) is a contemporary Australian poet. This is from Riot Eve.

Imagine a man – so polite, so clean; / his swiftness, his warmth, his murderous ideas. // Look, nothing in this world is perfect. / This is the condition, now growing darker. / History has shown us: the Black Death, the Borgias… / I await the real wooden anger that shapes me.

Head on fire

Polite Safety Notice by Mark Fiddes was the third prize winner of the 2018 National Poetry Competition.

Somewhere near you, a man in late middle age will be sitting on a bench / with his head on fire like a safety match. / On buses and trains, other men will smoulder suddenly roaring into flame / from the neck up. I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen them. /

Mark Fiddes’ first collection The Rainbow Factory was published by Templar Poetry in 2016 following the success of his award-winning pamphlet The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre (Templar Poetry, 2015). More recently, he’s won the Ruskin Prize and was runner-up in the Bridport Prize. The judges said of Polite Safety Notice, ‘Part of what makes the poem work is that it’s impossible to know whether what’s said is intended as a genuine expression of extreme rage against men, or is a parody of that.’