AustLit

'Deftly working across both verse and visual poetry, Skilbeck-Porter gathers aesthetic experience and layers thought and memory, structuring the collection through the central motif of the municipal swimming pool, where fragments of thought and observation swim and float to the surface. Observational, attentive, and at times surreal, Skilbeck-Porter’s work immerses the reader in a sensory experience that delights the eye and the mind. These Are Different Waters is the first iteration of what Skilbeck-Porter terms a ‘poetics of no division,’ where everything is permitted and boundaries are traversed, emphasising interrelatedness and fluidity without hierarchy. It is a sublime and accomplished debut from a poet who has been working in concrete and verse poetry for over a decade.

'Conceptual, droll and formally experimental, These Are Different Waters disposes its wide-ranging materials into an elegant two-part structure: ‘Inflatable pool’, and the substantial visual sequence, ‘Concrete Pool’. Skilbeck-Porter dares to devise her own weird syntax of hallucinatory profusion, a through-composed ‘ink spell’ of restless, post-Steinian parataxis. Decisive and yet dreamy, its poetic bricolage, ‘a stratosphere of shifting surfaces’, resists closure and passes the baton: ‘The end of my swim, the beginning of yours’. Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award Judges' (Publication summary)

'The Sydney launch of Corey Wakeling’s second collection of poetry The Alarming Consevatory at Frontyard Projects in Marrickville upended the traditional build up of acts that most expect from a poetry launch, with poets reading in an order drawn from a hat. The environment is amicable and warm, with young children running and playing and affectionately stealing attention from the readers by unwittingly performing alongside of them.' (Introduction)

'Created by The Red Room Company, New Shoots, is a poetic partnership with the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, Sydney Olympic Park and Bundanon Trust. The project celebrates and cultivates poems inspired by plants and place.

'Coinciding with the 200th birthday of the Royal Botanic Garden, poets Mark Tredinnick, Eileen Chong and Eric Avery have been commissioned to create "poetic pathways" now installed throughout the Garden. At Sydney Olympic Park, poet Lorna Munro is creating poems that will be embedded into the Badu Mangroves boardwalk. Linked creative learning resources also support a series of poetic workshops across these sites and others in the future.' (Source : Red Room Company website)