Thank you to everyone who joined Anna Kerdijk Nicholson and I at Gilbert's of Mittagong yesterday for a chat about her poetry; the what, how and why.

Anna Kerdijk Nicholson currently holds a position on the Board of Directors of Australian Poetry and was previously an editor for Five Bells. Along with Anna's contributions to the Australian poetry writing community, she has published two books of poetry, the first of which, The Bundanon Cantos, was mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Books of 2003. The collection of poems which became The Bundanon Cantos began in 1998 when Anna was Artist-in-Residence at Bundanon, near Nowra. Anna's second book, Possession, was published in 2010 and received the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the Victorian Premier's Prize and was shortlisted for the NSW and ACT Premier's Prizes. Anna told us that the success of Possession was like 'having a child and watching them go off to uni and get a real job', she is amazed at how well received the book has been. Anna has also won the Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry and has been a prizewinner in The Society of Women Writers NSW Inc. National Poetry Prize.

The afternoon began with Anna reading three of her poems, one of which was 'Terra Australis ... land of the inmost heart'. This poem, like many of Anna's, carries a hard hitting message about the colonisation of Australia. Anna has written:
                       ....The mail-box names down the Dam Road are recent tributes
                       to us coming here to find, by digging the earth, what
                       in our hearts we sought: Eccles, Johnston, McWhirter,
                       Naidu.... (2010, p43).
Here Anna acknowledges that all who have migrated to Australia have come to find a home, a place where they can belong. Many of the poems within Possession, as Anna pointed out, are modern sonnets, this poem included. The modern sonnet holds to the 14 lines, but is not concerned with rhyme in the same way that a traditional sonnet is. It was remarked that within her collection Possession the use of the modern sonnet is a tool through which Anna is able to create a conversation between the ideals held during the time of Captain Cook and twenty-first century, postcolonial Australia. Anna commented that she was once asked if she viewed herself as a 'postcolonial' writer. In order to respond to this she researched the term and was thrilled to find that her writing could be described as postcolonial, but noted that she would not have described herself as postcolonial, as she does not think in those terms when she writes. Though, she does believe that a good poem should always carry some hard hitting message, the politics of the writer, underneath the imagery and beauty of the writing. She hopes that her poetry is able to draw a reader in through her use of language and description, but that they will come out the other end thinking about the political underlying message that is conveyed. see More...