After each voyage has crumbled into ephemera I return to the house and its quay; I circle the edge before skittling off to the suburbs. Come to me, I cry, crass plastic and screaming sail, shining, golden city slumped and seeping tune! This evening my heart’s emptier than a harbour. I gulp down … Continue reading
Up Broome-way recently, I was reading Philip Hodgin’s early poems about cancer and thinking back to my own fights with it, wondering what the poems might have been like had I started writing my own by the time it all began. I put his book down to pick at a nail and found a huge, … Continue reading
do you know do you want to know my people? we’re the ones sitting the hairy legged gnomes sitting by the o cean paddocks sipping moisture from salty scars blee ding the in terminable drift sourcewards opens the wet eye so we can leave the bushy one c losed losen up read currents swells … Continue reading
Off the bus, it’s all light breeze and sea birds, a bit of fish smell, but mostly open sky and an air than lifts you towards it. Later on it warms up and the whole corroding city could be gliding over the escarpment. Things occur at a distance, their sounds barely reach you. Up closer, … Continue reading
Stuart Cooke was born in 1980 and grew up in Sydney and Hobart. He has published poetry, translations, fiction and essays, and his books include George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: a West Kimberley song cycle (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (Rodopi, 2013) and Edge Music (IP, 2011). … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 