The Drunken Boat

For features from presses and magazines in Australia.

For more poetry from Australia in Winter 2002

For all poetry in this issue.

Poetry from Australia – Spring 2002

A special feature of poets from Queensland

Selected and with an introduction by Liz Hall-Downs

Melissa Ashley is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Queensland. She recently completed the first draft of a novel, the weird sisters, and is currently working on a poetry manuscript, the way her body means the world for which she received an Arts Queensland Individual Writing Project Grant.In 2002 she is undertaking full time honours studies in literature at the University of Queensland. She has published her work in Australia, UK, USA and New Zealand.

Ross Clark‘s REMIX: poems ancient & modern was published late last year, bringing much of his work back into print, after his earlier volumes had sold out. Ross currently teaches English curriculum and creative writing at two universities in Brisbane, Australia, and is planning a tour with his poetry performance troupe The Bodgie Bards. He is represented in this issue by a selection of poems and a specially formatted poem.

B.R.Dionysius directed the Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival from 1997-2001 and is currently the Assistant Editor of the papertiger new world poetry CDROM journal. In 1998 he was awarded the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry. In 2000, his first collection Fatherlands was published by Five Islands Press in the New Poets Series 7 and he received a grant from the Australia Council to write a discontinuous verse novel – Universal Andalusia. He won the inaugural IP Picks 2002 Awards for his collection Bacchanalia that will be published by Interactive Press in September 2002. He lives in Brisbane, Australia. His work appears online in The Blackfellas, Whitefellas and Wetlands “Brisbane Stories” web site project at brisbane-stories and in The HOW2: Connect web anthology of new Australian male poets at how2connect.

Expatriate American Kim Downs has been living in Australia since 1980. He is a writer, musician, technician, and sculptor. He has published short stories, poems and essays in small press magazines including Australian Short Stories, Imago, Social Alternatives, Woorilla, Small Packages, Micropress, Westerly, and Idiom 23. In 1997, he and collaborator Liz Hall-Downs published the book/audio recording Fit of Passion (see our feature in this issue) and toured this material as a poetry and music show, assisted by a grant from Arts Queensland. Kim’s first novel, Jippi (Papyrus Publishing) was launched in October at the 2000 Brisbane Writers’ Festival. His next novel, The Brazen Heavens, is currently being marketed. At present Kim is working on a collection of linked short stories, which he describes as ‘reworkings of classical myths with an Australian flavour’.

Liz Hall-Downs has been reading and performing poetry in public (see her feature on performance poetry in this issue), and publishing in journals, since 1983. She has been a featured reader at countless venues across Australia, has toured the USA, and has had work published and broadcast on TV and radio in both countries. As well as poetry, Liz writes fiction and essays and has worked as a community artist, writer-in-residence, editor and singer. She has a BA in Professional Writing and Literature, and has recently submitted for an MA (Creative Writing) at the University of Queensland. Her most recent collection of poetry, Girl With Green Hair was published by Papyrus Publishing in 2000. Current projects include an ‘illness narrative’ in poetry, My Arthritic Heart, and a realist novel, The Death of Jimi Hendrix. She lives in paradise in south-east Queensland, with her partner and an assortment of cheeky parrots. Liz’s Introduction to the Queensland poetry scene is also in this issue, as is her article and poems on illness, My Arthritic Heart. With this issue, she joins The Drunken Boat as a Contributing Editor.

Jayne Fenton Keane‘s first book Torn was published in 2000 and her second book is due to be released in April 2002. JFK writes for many different media and has been awarded a scholarship to complete a Ph.D. in three-dimensional poetic structures. JFK has received several arts grants and Fellowships and is about to launch a new edition of The Stalking Tongue Vol. II: Slamming the Sonnet an online media project at www.poetinresidence.com. She was awarded the 2002 Mayne Multimedia Award for her collection of flash poetry in the first edition of The Stalking Tongue.

Bronwyn Lea was born in Tasmania in 1969 and grew up in Queensland and Papua New Guinea. She is the author of Flight Animals (University of Queensland Press, 2001), which won the 2001 Wesley Michel Wright Award, the 2001 Fellowship of Creative Writers Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the 2001 John Bray Poetry Prize. Individual poems of hers have won a number of prizes including the 2000 Arts Queensland Poetry Prize and the 2001 Somerset National Poetry Prize. She was educated at California State University in San Diego, where she lived for twelve years, and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Queensland. She lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her daughter.

Sara Moss is an English born poet now resident in Queensland, Australia. Her first collection, A Deep Fear of Trains, was published by Brisbane-based Interactive Press (see our feature in this issue). Her work covers a wide range of themes including illness and loss and private and public violence. Sara is currently working on a second collection for print and flash animated poetry for web and CD.

David Reiter is an award-winning poet and writer of fiction, and Director of Interactive Publications, a print and digital publisher in Brisbane. His fourth book, Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems, was shortlisted for the 1998 Adelaide Festival Literature Awards. His previous books include The Cave After Saltwater Tide (Penguin, 1994) for which he won the Queensland Premier’s Poetry Award. His book of short fiction, Triangles, was shortlisted for the 2000 Steele Rudd Award. His most recent works are Letters We Never Sent; The Gallery, a work of literary multimedia he has been touring in Australia; Kiss and Tell, Selected and New Poems 1987-2002; and Sharpened Knife, a multimedia murder mystery. The Planets, a fictive memoir in multimedia is currently under development.

Also from Australia

Helen Hagemann lives in Perth, Western Australia. Her books include ‘The Shadow Goddess and Until the Last Symphony Rises (Indian Ocean Books, 2001). Her work has appeared in the Southern Review, Journal of Australian Studies and Hecate. Her work has been published in the e-zines Recursive Angel, PixelPapers, Snakeskin, OzPoet, WildHoneyPress and Poetry Downunder. Helen’s poem “Permanent Aberrations” was runner-up in a 1998 Perth PEN International Competition, and she is included in ‘An Endless Afternoon (Lioness Publications, 2000) – an anthology celebrating birth and mothering by ‘Women in Publishing.’ Helen is studying towards her MA in Writing at Edith Cowan University and working on a novel. She works as a Coordinator on ECU’s Joondalup campus for the Peter Cowan Writers Centre. As a community arts administrator, she coordinated a Fringe Festival in November 2000 as part of the WA State Literature Centre’s, ‘Word of Mouth,’ Writers Festival.

Gig Ryan is the author of six poetry books: The Division of Anger (Transit Press, 1981); Manners of an Astronaut (Hale & Iremonger, 1984), The Last Interior (Scripsi Publications, 1986); Excavation (PanPicador Australia, 1990), Pure and Applied (Paper Bark Press, 1998); Heroic Money (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2001). Her new CD with her band, Driving Past, is due out in 2002, and she has also written the songs Six Goodbyes (with Disband; Big Home Productions, 1988) and Real Estate (with Driving Past, Chapter Music, 1999. She is Poetry Editor for The Age in Melbourne, Australia and a freelance reviewer.