2018 Dorothy Hewett Award shortlist sneak peek: Angela Gardner

Angela Gardner Dorothy Hewett The Dorothy Hewett Award The Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript

The third Dorothy Hewett Award will be announced at Perth Writers Week on Saturday 24 February. We hope you can join us to share a glass of sparkling wine and celebrate new Australian writing. Full event details are available here

 

In the lead up to the ceremony we will be giving you a sneak peek into the five shortlisted manuscripts... 

 

Angela Gardner

Angela Gardner studied Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art, Wales and received her MAVA from Griffith University. She is a member of the NightLadder Art Collective based in Brisbane. Her visual art often explores the nexus between word and image using drawing, printmaking and collage. Angela is the author of four collections of poetry: Parts of Speech (UQP, 2007), winner the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished Manuscript in 2006; Views of the Hudson (Shearsman Books UK, 2009); The Told World (Shearsman Books UK) and Thing&Unthing (Vagabond Press, Sydney), both 2014. A recent collaboration with the artist Caren Florance The future, unimagine was published by Recent Work Press & Ampersand Duck, Canberra in 2017. Angela is the recipient of awards and residencies including a Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy grant, an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Residency and a Churchill Fellowship. Together with Carmen Leigh Keates she edits the poetry journal www.foame.org. 

 

With a hovering intelligence and a laudable lack of ego, the beautifully controlled poems of ‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter’ investigate the world with an ecstatic’s eye.

 

SOME SKETCHY NOTES ON MATTER

 

GLASS

I lay down to enter the sky as birds will do

so openly, so traversable.

A blueness all around lifts above, chases the ever

-moving horizon. Not lining, not flap but somehow

dimensional. Further, further through the branches.

Exultant even in the slow progress of clouds.

Until the sky is a house made of the uprights of forest

and everywhere the leaves are set against more leaves

in the trees and in the hanging of the clouds.

 

UNKEMPT IF YOU WILL

Unkempt if you will

mazy with grass seed and insects.

By which you read Summer.

A season warm and static. Nothing

surely can happen beyond the buzz

of the bees in the salvia. Stay here, lie

on the lawn the whole day

until its light and heat dissolve into night

until at last we must seek shelter.

Forget about the dog, unpredictable

on the boundary, the strange look

she gets in her eyes as she lunges,

hurls her longing and discontent

repeatedly against the fence.

 

THE EYE AS PASSENGER

say blunt, say hone for distance and journey.

We miss, but this, this has edge, has axes

:the drift of conveyance. An eye runs along a surface forever

in transition, forever circling and dancing. Unfinished to finished,

the direction of shelter, a model of itself that faces its field

of possibility.

The eye as passenger on a back road, reaches

its not insubstantial fear (the too difficult/the nothing worth dark)

in the placement of a very large space. Absence as object

:background dissolved, foreground lost, no horizon but

the persistent engine of the bees, their shape of sound,

one thing substituted for another thing.


Older Post Newer Post


Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published