Blast 8

in this issue:

poetry by: poetry by John Carey / Rosemary Dobson / Lucy Dougan / Kevin Gillam / Dennis Greene / Lyn Hatherly / LK Holt / Joy Hooton / Elizabeth Lawson / Jacinta Le Plastrier / Cameron Lowe / Paul Magee / Tim Metcalf / John Millett / Mark O’Flynn / Geoff Page / Alex Skovron / Peter Steele / Leon Trainor

edited and published by ann nugent, canberra

Foreword: Ann Nugent

Welcome to Blast 8

For a metrically regular, and rhymed lightness, try Geoff Page’s Slanted Slates and / Tightened Lines, dedicated to the architect Aldo Giurgola. Page’s witty tribute to creativity gives good advice to both poets and architects: A building and a / well-turned poem / should both excel / at what they do: / Not too tall and / not too wide; / tangible but / airy, too.
Blast 8 includes tall wide and deep — all of it airy enough to breathe. Yet all the poems here, including Page’s, show poetry as an art of compression.

Rosemary Dobson’s haiku-inspired Poems a long way after Basho express a complex interaction between sensation and thought with utmost
limpidity. Each brief poem conveys a restorative sense of being made whole. Matsuo Basho’s poem The sea dark / the call of the teal / dimly white, on the other hand, is expanded to an extraordinary fullness by Tim Metcalf in the prose-poem An Unseen Wind, meditating on similar big questions.

Dennis Greene compresses such meditation into a light eight lines in
Captain Cook. The poem plays upon the location of Cook’s death at Hawaii, named the Sandwich Islands by Cook: No way to chart the shoreline of his wishes, / sandwiched between the liver and the brain.

Jacinta Le Plastrier’s Survivor: 12 Poems is made up of some tall and
some very short poems. All compress pent-up emotion, capturing frozen
moments of remembered images. Un-named adults are twined / in their
own, / heart-bed as the child-observer is left to her own devices. Poem 4
is loaded with coiled revenge, STEP SIDEWAYS / to the rut / hunt the dead. Poem 9 gets to the nub of isolation, huddled in brackets: (she wincing / shame). This is spare, confronting, forceful writing.

Paul Magee also deals with painful emotion in the three-stanza, untitled
poem on his dead father’s mysterious annual visit. The everydayness, We
make coffee in his ritual way, and He asks about my travels, overlays
emotional depths. Each line is redolent of present and past. Then there is
the grandchild: When they’re / older they’ll chat, and I’ll leave the floor
to them. Magee’s final double interrogatives, dangle like phone receivers
connecting a dead line over an unbridgeable silence: What do you do with
their silence? / Or is that what we are?

There’s been more than a little serendipity in Blast 8. The ‘Flower of
Kent’ has appeared in two poems — needless to say gravity was involved.
Famous conquerors of ice and snow turn up in another two.

Both quality and variety are, I hope, the hallmarks of Blast. All the poems
here, I think, can deliver in ways as varied as those I have just mentioned.
My thanks to Blast’s poetry consultant, the anthologist Dr John Leonard,
Patrick Brady and Janet Uhr for proofreading, Leon Trainor for mail-out,
Peta Nugent for design and layout, and Gaven Hempstead for maintaining
Blast’s webpage.

Blast’s list of subscribers continues to grow. A subscription form for
2009 is included in this issue — a Christmas gift for a friend perhaps.

Ann Nugent / editor

Blast is supported by the ACT Government