AustLit

'MY SISTER REQUIRED a dummy to go to sleep at night, well into primary school. She clutched a scrap of tartan cloth – ‘Red Rugs’ – in one hand while sucking on ‘Num Nums’, until my mother resolved to enforce weaning. I, the younger sister, was proud not to have such a childish addiction. I rejected dummies and instead kept a toy rabbit as my night-time companion.' (Introduction)          

'This essay discusses the revival of a failed creative/biographical poetry project, on Australian ballerina Lucette Aldous. I had begun this project in 2015 but, despite several years of research—both archival (Ballet Rambert and Victoria & Albert, London; Australian Ballet archives at the Arts Centre, Melbourne) and through interviews with Aldous in Perth—I was unable to find a way to structure and convey the ‘life’, and the project was put aside in 2018. Lucette Aldous passed away in 2021, and this loss was followed by Australian poet Jordie Albiston’s unexpected passing, in February 2022. In part, it was the proximity of these two losses that sparked the revival of the Aldous project, fuelled as I was both by a sadness that I had not been able to deliver a completed manuscript to the retired ballerina before she died, and also by my revisiting of the poems in Albiston’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Albiston’s poems, often documentary in nature, and ruled by mathematics and constraint yet open to possibility, multiplicity, irony, opened a way for me to move forward with the Aldous project.' (Publication abstract)

'Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours shares and celebrates the fascinating life stories of everyday Australians.

'Based on one-on-one interviews with forty-five participants, the fifteen poets involved in this project have shaped poems that provide unique and lasting remembrances of the experiences, memories and reflections of members of our older generations.

'Some poems focus on a significant moment, while others provide a wider life narrative. The poems capture important stories of travel and work, family and milestones, achievements and struggles; they provide humble advice to younger generations, learned through circumstance, curiosity, or necessity.

'The poems are paired with watercolour portraits by artist Sierra McManus.' (Publication summary)

'Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world? While we – poets, non-poets, regular and irregular poetry readers alike – often turn to poetry in the face of grief, trauma, depression or injustice, is this ‘turning to’ the poem merely borne of tradition, in that we call upon poetry for its ability to speak through inarticulable depths of feeling? Or, do we intuitively sense that part of poetry’s purpose is to provoke or invoke change?' (Introduction)