Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I’ll choose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you’ll get to enjoy a taste of them too. I may not manage it every month. But, if I do, that will equal 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). What an excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

Here are my 16 poetry quotes for February.

1. ‘From Nowhere at All’ by Arseny Tarkovsky (translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dmitri Psurtsev)

From nowhere at all / I arrived to split the indivisible miracle /
into flesh and blood

Arseny Tarkovsky (1907–1989) spent most of his life as a translator of Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and other Asian poets, publishing his own poems only after Stalin’s death. He was one of the leading Russian poets to emerge from the Soviet era and his son Andrei Tarkovsky’s films gave his verse a second life. I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, has been shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards.

2. ‘A Studio in Prague’ for Mirek Jiranek by Martin Harrison

… and open to the air, supporting surfaces you drive over in Poland / when its lakes, snow-fringed with wedding-cake ice / echo with sunset wind soughing in birch trees—can all of them // be reduced to / a glass of milk spilt on a polished table / when you reached over for a crayon? It was a flash-moment, a flesh-moment. A moment of inspiration. Well, it became this little disaster. But the trams kept on running in the street, /

Martin Harrison (1949–2014) was an Australian poet and essayist. He taught writing and sound studies at the University of Technology Sydney and won the Wesley Michel Wright prize for poetry in 2002. ‘A Studio in Prague’ appears in Wild Bees—a collection that contains works he recast from the 1990s as well as newer poems.

3. ‘Cleopatra’s Palace as an Elaborate Metaphor for Why I did not Call Him Back’ by Clementine Von Radics

These days poetry / is the only language / I know how to speak. / But he speaks anthropology. / He speaks hieroglyphs. / He spends his life studying things / I can only bury / in metaphors.

Clementine von Radics is an internationally touring poet. She is the founder of Where Are You Press, a publishing house that focuses on the voices of young women. Her latest book, Mouthful of Forevers, was a #1 Bestseller on Amazon.

4. ‘Bedouin of the London evening’ by Rosemary Tonks

Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms / Great city, filled with wind and dust! / Bedouin of the London evening, / On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost. / And like a medium who falls into a trance / So deep, she can be scratched to death / By her Familiar—at its leisure! / I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown / While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth. / I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste.

Rosemary Tonks (1932–2014), the author of two poetry collections and six novels, was the subject of Brian Patten’s BBC radio documentary The Poet Who Vanished.

5. ‘The Long Boat’ by Stanley Jasspon Kunitz

somehow he felt absolved and free / of his burdens, those mottoes // stamped on his name-tag: / conscience, ambition, and all / that caring. / He was content to lie down / with the family ghosts / in the slop of his cradle, / buffeted by the storm, / endlessly drifting. / Peace! Peace!

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (1905–2006) was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.

6. ‘Moonlight Sculptures’ by Stephen Edgar

We slide apart across a moon-slicked sheet, / And all the intermittent anaglyphs / of you the moon is working to / Complete, / I see each time I wake and view / Your light-shaped body as it stirs and shifts.

Stephen Edgar is a Sydney-based poet who studied classics and English at the University of Tasmania and has worked as an editor and a librarian.

His tenth book and most recent poetry collection, Exhibitions of the Sun (in which ‘Moonlight Sculptures’ appears) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2015.

7. ‘Entr’acte’ by Louis Armand

In the sorting rooms of memory, we are / walking and walking past abandoned dry docks, // freight depots, junked out piers. The candour / of natural history finds no refuge here. // Creeping through twilight towards whatever’s / in store for us: the death-ray or the doomsday box.

Louis Armand is a Sydney-born writer who has lived in Prague since 1994. He is the author of six novels. ‘Entr’acte’ is from his most recent poetry collection Indirect Objects. He directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, where he also edits the international arts magazine VLAK.

8. ‘Ithaca’ by Linda Godfrey

The wine shines tannic skin and sweet flesh, those lines written in the bath. Once I clean up the poem I see the edges, heavy on the iambic, sit down with the suitors like gangsters (don’t count the shields and silver spoils), there is beauty, but it is done, no longer pastoral, a quality to their lying changes me.

Linda Godfrey lives and writes in Wollongong and loves the prose poem. She works as an editor and, until recently, curated the live readings at Little Fictions at Knox Street Bar.

9. ‘crossing the mountains’ by Mark Roberts

i held my mother’s hand /as we walked the length of the train /past /carriage / after / carriage / until we came to engine / a dirty red box on wheels / sucking a humming sound / out of wires / the seats were big / & comfortable / i watched the platform / swarming with people / i was disappointed / when I heard the horn / it sounded like a truck / i thought all trains / had a whistle

Mark Roberts is a Sydney-based writer and critic. He is a founding editor of Rochford Street Review and ‘crossing the mountains’ was published in the Stockholm Review of Literature. He has a collection of work, Concrete Flamingos, due for publication in early 2016.

10. ‘Larrea’ by Louise Mathias

I’m just eating a sandwich with Sarah, / when the wind picks up, and her hair // becomes another, // crucial, planet. Night running off / with itself. Away // from your star.

Louise Mathias is the author of The Traps. She lives in Joshua Tree, California.

11. ‘Leaving Home’ by Nasim Patel

As a kid / Takeoff was as exciting as / 1969 / The lights sucked into an /abyss of dust / Cars like droplets of blood / Roads shrunk down to veins / The land exhaled / Life that we protect with a / membrane of amnesia / Afraid Afraid that the frayed wire / that bonds us will split / A teardrop wedding ring / down the sink

Nasim Patel’s ‘Leaving Home’ won first prize in the Young Poets Awards 2015, administered by International Poetry Studies Institute, University of Canberra.

12. ‘Diary Poem: Uses of the Female Duet’ by Jennifer Maiden

The pensioners are on small blue chairs, / alarmed at the threat to their money, after / Abbott’s budget. Macklin and Parke have humour, / compose mouths, composed hands, to look / like good schoolteachers or schoolgirls: honey / smiles not a threat to any / body’s second biscuit, cup of tea. They / make each other credible, which is / any duet’s requirement.

Jennifer Maiden’s collections have won multiple Australian prizes and Drones and Phantoms was recently awarded the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. ‘Diary Poem: Uses of the Female Duet’ appears in her 19th, and most recent, collection, The Fox Petition.

13. ‘Honey’ by Jan Owen

When I return / to the pine beach house / the bare end room reeks of honey: / hundreds of bees / drowse in the ooze of light / below the blind. / A large one still alive / is urgently spiralling out / the Apis mellifera seventeen-point / Survival Plan. / My two sons slept here once / in a chaos of Scrabble and paperbacks. / And now my daughter has gone / to a land whose ways / are formal and precise as bees.

Jan Owen is one of the most accomplished Australian poets of her generation. She has published seven collections, including Jan Owen Poems 1980–2008 in which ‘Honey’ appears. Additionally, in Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, she says she ‘aimed [in translating the poems] to turn [Charles] Baudelaire’s French poems into convincing English poems while keeping as close as I could to the original texts’.

14. ‘Learning to Swim’ by Catherine Bateson

His big body was as pale as parsnip, black hairs sprouted / in unlikely places but his hands were like talc and / I loved his unhappiness, his migraines. //  I’d always had boys before, stumbling through their paces lights off and everything, even their knees, strange in the dark. / This was so different, like learning to swim / after years of walking your hands in the shallows / fooling nobody.

Catherine Bateson writes for children and young adults and regularly works as a poet and novelist in schools around Australia. ‘Learning to Swim’ is published in Marriage for Beginners, her third collection of poetry.

15. ‘The Orchard’ by Kathleen Jamie

Here is the late half-land / where the underworld, / the moon-shadow of an apple tree // is darkness, like the earth / we’re called from— / silent but for a hush / like heavy skirts; / women, perhaps, passing / on the far side of a wall

Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. ‘The Orchard’ is from her poetry collection The Tree House, which won both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. She is Chair of Creative Writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife.

16. ‘My Mother’s House’ by Elizabeth Smither

Once, near nightfall, I drove past my mother’s house. / She was inside it, moving about some task. / I saw her move from room to room. // I could have stopped. Shortly she would draw the blinds / but a knock on the door might alarm her / who had her routine for night. // It was all those unseen moments we do not see / the best of a friend, the best of a mother / competent and gracious in her solitude // as if she was concentrating as she had as a child / on something she was reading or pondering / a thought that occupied a minute of a day

Elizabeth Smither’s latest publications are a collection of poems, The Blue Coat, and a suite of poems for her granddaughter, Ruby, Ruby Duby Du.