Patricia Sykes

 

Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems and collections have received various nominations and awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, John Shaw Neilson award and the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. Shortlistings include the Anne Elder, Mary Gilmore, and Judith Wright Awards. She has read her work widely, inlcuding on Australian, Paris and New Zealand radio. It has also been the subject of ABC radio programs, Poetica and The Spirit of Things. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. A selection of her poems, Aomg the gone of it, was published in an English/Chinese edition by Flying Island Books in 2017. A song cycle composed by Andrew Aronowicz, based on her collection The Abbotsford Mysteries, premiered at The Abbotsford Convent Melbourne — now an arts precint  — in 2019.

Danny Gentile

 

Pam Brown

Pam Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria. Most of her childhood was spent on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. Since her early twenties, she has lived in Melbourne and Adelaide, and has travelled widely in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as well as Europe and the U.S., but mostly she has lived in Sydney. She has made her living variously as a silkscreen printer, bookseller, postal worker and has taught writing, multi-media studies and film-making and worked from 1989 to 2006 as a librarian at University of Sydney.

From 1997 to 2002 Pam Brown was the poetry editor of Overland and from 2004 to 2011 she was the associate editor of Jacket magazine.  She has been a guest at poetry festivals worldwide, taught at the University for Foreign Languages, Hanoi, and during 2003 had Australia Council writers residency in Rome. In 2013 she held the Distinguished Visitor Award at the University of Auckland, New Zealand 

 

Iris Fan Xing

 

Lucy Dougan

 

Merima Dizdarevic

 

Melinda Louise Smith

 

Anne Walsh

 

Huang Lihai

 

Phil Hammial

 

Ross Donlon

 

Born in Ashfield, Sydney and now living in  Castlemaine, Victoria, Ross Donlon has published five collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks. First published in The Bulletin in his teens, he enjoyed (you might say) a long break of over thirty years before publishing again, a second budding, as Judith Rodriguez once said. 

Many years of travel and working at all sorts before arriving at teaching (state secondary and some tertiary), he is now mostly retired and traveling again. Happily he has featured at some poetry and arts festivals in various parts of Australia as well as in Europe, and has spent considerable time in Norway, a country with a society and political system close to his heart.

Active in Castlemaine arts, he convened literary components of three state festivals and has run poetry readings for many years. These feature local, Melbourne, interstate and even some international poets, such as English poet Chrys Salt, in 2019, and Scot, Hugh McMillan slated for 2021, but who knows whether Hugh will make it.

As publisher of Mark Time Books, he acted as editor for a number of leading Australian poets, and lately two poets in the U.K.

A program on the now lost Radio National program, Poetica, was devoted to a sequence of poems about his father, a U.S, serviceman he never met. A beautiful production.

He has been lately featured on Zoom readings at events from Scotland, England and Nashville, Tennessee.

Ross's own poetry has received favourable reviews in national newspapers in Australia, if not literary journals - he's that kind of poet.

He would add a pic here if he knew how. Great to otherwise be a part of the Flying Islands experience.

His Flying Islands pocketbook is, The Bread Horse, which features his own etching. 'The First Horse' on the cover.

Failure to Launch

 They perform funny songs and witty and award-winning poetry but can they actually get their books off the ground?

Robert Edmonds is a writer/comic performer whose poetry has been published many times and has been nominated for and won prizes, but Gravity Doesn’t Always Work is his first collection.

Clark Gormley is a writer/singer/comedian who has performed one-man comedy shows and written three albums worth of songs for Nerds & Music, but his poetry collection Not What You Think deserves a bigger audience.

Watch them perform their best work of a lifetime over 45 fun-filled and story-packed minutes!

Sunday 21 March, 11 am! at Carrington Bowlo $5 entry, tickets through The Newcastle Fringe. https://www.stickytickets.com.au/brqx5

Saturday 27th March 6.30pm at Harp of Erin Theatre. Next to Wollombi General Store. $30 meal plus show. BYO. Table bookings only. Limited seats. Book in store or call 49983230. 

Candy Tang Ting

 

                                           

Camellia Wei

 

Toby Fitch

 

Mark Tredinnick

 

Gillian Swain

Gillian Swain

 My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) is Gillian Swain’s first book, following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001). Gillian’s poetry is published in various anthologies including A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2014), The Grieve Anthology (Hunter Writers Centre, 2014; 2019) and some journals including Burrow #1 (Old Water Rat Publishing, 2020), and the Australian Poetry Collaboration (2019). Gillian shared equal first place with Magdalena Ball for the Maclean’s Booksellers Award, in the Grieve Project 2019. She has been feature poet at several events around the east coast of NSW, holds poetry workshops for adults and children and is the curator of poetry and related events at the Indie Writers Festival 'IF Maitland', plus other poetry events. Gillian spent her childhood exploring the waterfront of Lake Macquarie and has lived in Newcastle, Northern NSW, the UK and Ghana, after finishing studies at the University of Newcastle. She lives in East Maitland NSW with her husband and their four children, where they run their successful coffee roasting business, River Roast.

The cover picture on My Skin its own sky is an extract from Girl on a swing in blue on blue by John Maitland. Look up his work, it's wonderful.

Poems from My skin its own sky

Summer Holidays 

After "Fair Haired Girls End of Summer Holidays" by John Maitland.

Broom-straw grass whispers to our shins

as we wade toward the end

of summer holidays.

Our hair fair and sun bleached

scruffy clusters like

broom-straw grass.

We have played, these days.

We have moved stridently

across the endlessness of summer

have understood the sky

and have become the dry, bending

hush   of broom straw-grass.

Our longish white dresses breathe.

We look forward and completely

occupy each step and have nowhere

except the heat-hazed horizon to reach.

Nothing is everywhere. Nothing

fills our days solidly.

Summer sweeps us forward as we

are every   last   delicate   chance   of magic

we sweep through, ethereal.

We don’t know how beautiful we are.

All we know is floating

and sweeping

through summer parched paddocks

and broom-straw grass.

Ambulance 

They took you this morning.

The lamp turned like a red light-house

one way.

You’re on rocky ground

I balance

for now

on love’s groundswell of stillness.

This too will pass.

Renovators hints and tips 

No crimes are hidden

in the white bathroom

of one who washes often

and cleans rarely.

My Skin, its own sky

and how did the storm treat you

 

Sheets lit

sky bright

skin electric

took me up

gave a good thrashing.

 

how did the ground reply

 

Grass leant

back to let it

in   happy for the return

of wild.

Familiar wind hurl of   rain

slid like syrup down

soft blades

to earth.

 

were you hungry in the cold

 

Not cold.

Warm air   wet every

pore swam and I gave it

salt   my skin   its own sky

my tongue

fresh with the landscape of night.

Hunger only for more.

 

was it deafening

 

All I could hear

was everything,

flicked and billowed out

crowds of spirit answerings

there for the listener

in time with always.

 

was the room big enough

 

A storm needs no manners

treats as it pleases

and what lush treat it is.

You wonder at the space an altar

inhabits   hear this

the gods laughed when you asked

these questions

 

thunder has no walls.

Papa Osmubal

 

Richard Tipping

 

 

Richard Tipping’s Instant History is a treasure trove of uncollected and new work, in two parts. The Postcard Life brings intense responses to travel in fifteen countries in the 1970s and 1980s. From a meeting with the Empress of Iran, to sailing along the coast of Mexico; from tongue-twists in Tipperary to Vipassana meditation in the Sierras; from ancient sex in Luxor to the visual collisions of Tokyo and quietitudes in Kyoto; from drug-shattered New York to being lost in the Louvre. In the second half of the book, Rush Hour in the Poetry Library, socially pointed but affectionate poems from Tipping’s adopted home in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales mix with a sardonic politics, humorous social observation, and pictures from a philosophical writing life. Best known as a visual poet and word artist these days, Tipping brings a fresh and energetic voice to the page.

Biographical note

 
Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, South Australia and studied in humanities at Flinders University. He has lived in the USA (1974/75), and the UK and Europe (1984/86). While lecturing in media arts at the University of Newcastle he completed a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects (2007). Tipping has published eight books of poetry, and is known internationally as an artist working with sign language and typographic concrete. He is strongly represented in the print collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the British Museum, London; and is collected in depth by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Tipping lives
between gigs in Newcastle and Maitland, NSW.
www.richardtipping.com

 

Three poems from Instant History
 

Writing Class
 

The poet presents himself as a dichotomy.
Whatever is apparent becomes obscured,
and all the luscious facts wither into hard statistics.
Born here, did that, intended something else
but I forget what. The intruding ‘I’.
The breakneck speed on machines of make-believe
which finally slow motion curve into the cemetery.
Alibis salute the endless proud moments
passing in formal parade. I returns to me and
assumes him. The biography keeps breaking in
to the picture, looking for safety pins or paper clips or
a staple gun, anything to fence out
layers of advice peeling from public walls:
reality is for people who can’t cope with art.
Written words line up like bright pills in a glass case,
your fingers turning the key.
Time is for people who can’t stop.
Rigor mortis keeps looking at the clock.

Tipperary

 
These cont-pink faithful churches in stone-walled Tipperary
raising both armed pulpits up to rectify divided Heaven
coughing out red barns and slate-tight cottages
for slurring rain to barricade, tipping thatched tweed caps
in all the wheeling, run-down towns
to the budding eyes of mud-faced potatoes,
black and white cows chewing saturated greens
and tourist butter pats in squares of gold
ending the rainbow in a pint of real Guinness
coal-black as the castle-burning barons of Yawn.
The roads are running sore with unfinished yarns
where the truth is history trying to awake
on signs in languages both half unused
and Ireland stuck between the water and the wafer
there’s no way around the priests but a faithful daughter
with a smiling paddywhack clinging to the steeple
the North’s the gold harp stolen from the people.

Earth Heart

 
Blood, sap, rain and sea -
Earth’s heart is sweet water
Flowing in spirals of gravity.
Vast clouds sail past, reflecting
In a rippling blue lake of sky
Their endless ideas for change.
You can feel each slow tree
By the green shore breathing
Time’s dappled shadows in.
Fresh weather. Swallows’ wings
Near pebble edges lapped by tide
Quick dancing in the rising wind.
 

Note: This poem was written for Hear the Art (Earth Heart) 1996. a typographic visual poem made of bricks, 26 metres in diameter, permanently installed in the grounds of Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW, Australia. Hear the Art was the winner of theinaugural acquisitive Sculpture Park Prize

 

 

 See a review of Instant History by Jean Kent at Rochford St Review.

Some publications by Richard Tipping
 

Soft Riots (poems)
Domestic Hardcore (poems)
Word Works – Airpoet (visual poems - folio)
Signs of Australia (photographs)
Diverse Voice (visual poems)
Nearer by Far (poems)
Headlines to the Heart (poems)
Five O’clock Shadows (poems)
The Sydney Morning (visual poems – four print folios)
Multiple Pleasures (postcard catalogue)
Public Works (visual poems – art catalogue)
Multiple Choice (art catalogue)
Lovepoem (visual poems– folio)
Subvert I Sing (visual poems)
Off the Page & back again (visual poems)
Love Cuts (photos & poems, with Chris Mansell)
Tommy Ruff: Adelaide Poems
Instant History (poems)