There is a poem in As far as I can see (AUP, 1999) that imagines a future time: They gave me flowers and asked where I would go. To open the eyes of the soul, I said. There is a way but this is only the first gate. milk and honey is a dance to the music of that future time. It looks back and remembers. It looks forward and tries to see what will happen next. Its theatre is the world turning round and what can be saved each day from a life of the imagination. It builds tentative structures...
The cats in Ivan's poems bear strong resemblance to their owners - in fact, often seem to BE their owners. These stylish works of art are zany, quirky, cutting, sad, funny, frisky, boisterous, even at times reverential. They convey vast amounts of biographical information in easy to read bite-size pieces. Romanticism permeates Ivan's love lyrics, music lyrics and love-music lyrics. Even so, intense feeling is sometimes qualified by a kind of surrealism and by the use of striking puns which are...
Rhyming Psalms - Volume 2 (Rhyming Psalms, #2)
by Thucydides Hilocometoot Chalm
The title, Folk Tunes, arises from my appointment in 2003 as a `Poet-in-residence’ at The National Folk Festival in Canberra. I was struck by the immediacy, the lightness, of appeal to a broad audience in much folk music, both in its `raw’ performance, and when it is taken up in Classical Music, such as in the work of Vaughan Williams, Holst and others. So I began composing poems that tried to combine immediacy in their sense and musicality in their versification. Some of the contents are love p...
This book includes selection from Ouyang Yu’s poetic work, published or unpublished, for more than a decade straddling the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, in work such as Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes (2002) and Foreign Matter (2003), a selection which provides the best introduction to his work.