We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 113
WINTER 2008
EDITORIAL
Gina Mercer
This is a decidedly poetic edition of Island. We celebrate the joyous and endangered art of poetry. We encourage you to act decisively and enter a poem in this year’s Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and we must, sadly, farewell our poetry editor, James Charlton.
James has worked tirelessly as Island’s poetry editor for six years. He has shown a fine sensibility, a keen intellect and an admirably catholic ethic when selecting poems. His contribution to Island and the Australian literary community has been invaluable. Thank you, James. We wish you well with both your postgraduate research in philosophy at the University of Tasmania and the further development of your writing.
James published a poetry collection last year, So Much Light. You will find his book reviewed in this issue of Island. I commissioned this review because his book is a significant publication, but I acted completely independently of James, sending it offshore to a New Zealand reviewer.
Elsewhere you will find a feast of poetry matters. Judith Beveridge and Dorothy Porter, two of Australia’s leading poets, converse in depth about the effect of African safaris and blue-tongue lizards on their poetry. They each contribute a powerful new poem to the conversation.
Myron Lysenko meditates on the shift in his poetic technique when he stopped drinking red wine in his bedroom and started going out into the world, sitting on park benches and picnic rugs, learning to see afresh.
Kris Hemensley writes on globalisation and the running of a poetry specialist bookshop for twenty-five years. What poetic careers he has seen develop (and perish), what vast numbers of poets he has helped and nurtured over that long period of dedicated service to Australian poetry.
In a wry memoir, Jennifer Compton reports on her talk on the ethics of writing about her hometown, Wingello. This talk she delivered to a bemused audience in Venice, as she rested her ‘postcolonial bum’ on the desk where Napoleon had once signed the treaty with the Austrians.
We are proud to publish the winners of the 2007 Gwen HarwoodPoetry Prize. You’ll find them to be a strong, diverse selection of some of the best poems being written in Australia today. Would you like to see your poem here next year? If so, enter the 2008 competition. Or why not pass on the entry form (downloadable from our website at: http://www.islandmag.com) to someone who may need your gentle encouragement?
After all, this issue and its contributors are all involved in nurturing the endangered art of writing poetry. Like a population of rare parrots or potoroos, Australian poets struggle for survival in a world which frequently sees their endeavours as marginal, uncommercial and even downright dubious. Join with Island in nurturing: poetic thoughts, publishers of poetry, and even poets in their natural habitat.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au