Kathleen Jamie, “The Blue Boat”
How late the daylight edges
toward the northern night
as though journeying
in a blue boat, gilded in mussel shellwith, slung from its mast, a lantern
like our old idea of the soul
From Waterlight: Selected Poems. You can hear Jamie read from several of her poems at The Poetry Archive. The first third of Waterlight contains poems from The Tree House, a collection which won the 2004 Guardian Forward Prize for Poetry.
9 July 2007 | poetry |
Les Murray, “The Test”
How good is their best?
And how good is their rest?
The first is a question to be asked of an artist.
Both are the questions to be asked of a culture.
From The Biplane Houses. This recent collection from “Australia’s leading poet” was recently reviewed in the New Yorker, where Dan Chiasson, while describing the poet as a self-created “cartoon hick in an overplayed idiom,” went on to say that “the thrill of reading Murray is seeing how the heart that feels will catch up with the eye that sees.” Les Murray’s website has an assortment of poems from the new collection.
24 June 2007 | poetry |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
