Australian Poetry Library

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Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon was born in Carlton, Transvaal, South Africa....read more

Features

Poets

  • Vincent Buckley, photographer unknown

    Vincent Buckley

    Vincent Buckley was born at Romsey, in the Macedon Ranges, Victoria, on 8 July 1925. ... more
  • Ken Bolton, 2004, photo courtesy the author

    Ken Bolton

    Ken Bolton was born in Sydney in 1949. He attended the University of Sydney, graduating ... more
  • Richard Kelly Tipping in his studio, portrait by Juno Gemes©

    Richard Tipping

    Richard Tipping was born in Adelaide in 1949. He studied at Flinders University in the ... more
  • C. J. Dennis

    C. J. Dennis

    Clarence Michael James Dennis, the eldest child of James Dennis, a hotelier, and his wife ... more

Review

Interview: Alison Croggon, May 2013

Why do you write poetry?  I’ve never been quite sure why. I’ve written it for as long as I can remember. I experience the desire to write it as a kind of pressure, an internal necessity that eventually emerges in a poem.   Is poetry important? I don’t know how to answer that. The fact is that it’s not important to many people: they get by their whole lives without encountering it, and who is to say they are the worse for that? I’m reluctant to proselytise about poetry: why should anyone read it, if they don’t want to? It’s ... ...read review

Poems

The Democracy Of Water by Paul Hetherington

If water is democratic, filling
every place equally, according
to level, it's also aristocratic,
sharply silver in early morning
like old Austrian armour, and cold

as a ripple of silk. Strangely bland,
a no-taste in the lifted glass
suggesting absence, yet it's sublime
on the body, holding swimmers ... more

House for Sale by Vivian Smith

So many people have lived here who loved
love, awakening and sweeping up the dust.
The well is bottomless and doesn't show the moon,
the ancients have gone and taken nothing away.
The ivy takes over beneath the winter sky,
and only soot remains, their mark of coffee grounds.
I settle down now to long unravelled dreams.
I love the scum of other people's souls
mixed with the garnet coloured fringes of the chairs,
... more