Event: PoemsEvent, the first book by Australian poet Judith Bishop, is the work of a border-crosser. Emotionally intense, formally inventive and musical, with influences ranging from Ted Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop to Yves Bonnefoy, these poems have won prestigious awards in Australia and the U.S. and feature in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (U.Q.P) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (Black Inc.).. Local and global at once, with a strong naturalist bent, they gather in birds, flora and fauna from across four continents, Australia, North and South America and Europe. Central to the collection is a striking sequence poem which inhabits the voice of the Aztec translator in the Spanish Conquest, La Malinche. Indeed, the human voice - a form of breath, but "irreversible" in what it says and does - performs the principal role in this book's erotic theatre of love and betrayal. Event is, above all, a book of intimate dialogues between a human self and her others: lovers, animals, elements of the natural world, and deities, some distant, some destroyed. Wind, too, has a leading part, taking on the dual role of a natural force and of something close to fate. Rising as if out of nowhere in these poems, wind is a metaphor for the pure nature of events which occur without premonition and without recourse. |
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adoration Angeli angels appeared Arrival Australian begin bird birth blue body bones Book born breaking breath broke called child cloud cold comes conquest corpses Cortés dawn death direction Doña Marina dreams drops earth enter eyes falling feathers feet fingers flower girl Give glass gods grass hands heart held High hour human hunger Imagined ITEM kill kiss land lean leaves light listen Look lord market square meaning Mexica MICHIGAN morning mother mouth moved never night parrot pine poem quail rain Review rising river rock sang seeds seemed seen shadowed sharp Shells shining shivers sing smoke snow Sorretto da Quattro speak spring stones stopped summer surface tension tell thing thought tongue translates tree tries turns voice walked warm watches wind window wings winter woman young