Join Pitt Street Poetry and Giramondo for the Brennan / Davies double poetry launch at the Brett Whiteley Studios on Sunday afternoon at 2pm.  A Sydney Writers Festival event.

http://www.swf.org.au/component/option,com_events/Itemid,124/agid,3599/task,view_detail/

to the season a fig tree barks with verdant persistence on

a shapeless sharp stone knoll

it's hot on this dry desiccated morning

What other disasters slide to ground beneath her roots into black depths in pursuit of levity

They all know I’m 75% water, to linger may sate my curiosity and quench their thirst

This blanched ground grips her fauna,

Forcing it to ground between raised limestone rolls and tumbles

the cycads gather in the…

In The Antipodes talk of war is easy and fitting, as it is here as it was in the beginning, and with these words becomes the rhythm, the drumbeat and the gossip even after the blood is long ago drained away and replaced by the bronze of the Palaeolithic age, as if the electricity of a nation is forged in the furnace of news far away from these marsupial shores in the fields of Flanders and France and over there on Turkish beaches and over there in the jungles beyond the straits and over…

Latest from Rochford Street Review Confronting the Culture, Language and History of War: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Valence: Considering War Through Poetry and Theory’ by Susan Hawthorne…

Okay folks, what are some of your favourite lines from Australian poems? Here's one of mine, from Kenneth Slessor's 'City Nightfall': 'And there is only the quiet noise of planets feeding'. What an imagination KS had. Love it. LJ, May 13.  

He tore out the engine

of our 1983 Commodore,

patched it up

with his own mind's making

to make it run on water.…

I'm very much looking forward to the launch of Luke Davies' re-issued early 80s volume 'Four Plots for Magnets' on May 26th at the Brett Whiteley Studio. I planted a seed re. that collection's phoenix-like return... Well done for publishing it again, John Knight. LJ, May 3.