Potato blossom time

This is Kipler potato- cross and longitudinal section printing using beetroot juice, some water colour paint and a little drawing pen.

Reversals of removed fortunes

Three images from a series about change and constancy, perception and removal .

& Blossom time in Sydney.

What it takes to be the same, duplication and colour

in black and white.

Invitation to the Launch of Fishing in the Devonian

Show Me the Treasure readers are cordially invited to the launch of my first book Fishing in the Devonian.

The book will be launched by Robin Williams from Radio National’s The Science Show on Thursday 18th September 2008 at the Mosman Community Centre, at 6.30 for 7pm. The Mosman Community Centre is on the corner of Short Street ( also called Art Gallery Way) and Myahgah Place. All the details are set out in the attached invitation.

As a pre-quel to the launch, ABC Radio National’s Poetica program will be featuring some of the science based poems as part of National Science Week. This program will be broadcast on the 16th August 2008 at 3.05 pm, and again on 21st August at 3.05 pm. If you miss it, you can listen to it later online.


yours cheerfully


carol jenkins

Poetica - Fishing in the Devonian on Radio National

Radio National are featuring my science-based poems in their Poetica program of as part National Science Week. The program went to air at 3pm Saturday 16th August 2008 and will be replayed 3.05pm Thursday 21st August. You can also listen online at Poetica.



The program is a very cool kind of pre-quel to the launch of my book Fishing in the Devonian, which will be published in September this year by Puncher and Wattmann.

My thanks and appreciation to Producer Anna Messariti , Presenter Mike Ladd, Actors Penny Hackforth-Jones, Peter Kovitz and Daniel Smith, and Sound Engineers Judy Rapley and Andrei Shabunov.

Thanks to a whole load of musicians for the sound track, in particular Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupuynu whose incredibly beautiful voice and music can be heard in the song Djarrimirri which introduces the poem Kulin Seasons.

Quay to Mosman

37 gulls halo
the Opera House.
The ferry engine thuds in, laying
the water black blue black,
it laps against the yellow light
of Denison; to the south the green stairs
of the Boulevard, lights phosphoresce, a salt crust
sparking the South-East head, diesel perfume
and the prop’s peristalsis.
North’s a scattering red and white -
a US navy duck, unlit, like a pause,
thwacks past – a dark gap blacks the East
intensifies the metal’s clang and rattle,
the pump gags brine back to the sea.
Wind-blow and bluster
chill my body homeward from the fine
harbour of this night.

Owl Service

Owl Service
for Francis Mabel Cotton 1917-2008

When I first met Francis Cotton I was wild kind of university student,who had miraculously made friends with her incredibly elegant daughter - Julia Cotton. Julia was dancing with Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) in Adelaide where I was bumbling through a Science Degree. Of my dishevelled idea to change to speech pathology, she said, "Sort out your finances first." It may well have been the only advice I have ever taken, and still sometimes, I can hear Frances in my head, telling me to get my finances in order.

I was to find out that this was probably the sternest prospect of Frances ever presented. It was not that she was not habitually practical. She might have presented herself as a bit whimsical, she had a rigour of capability. She was a perfect balletomane - and it is very much to her creative credit that she supported and nurtured Julia's very fine career in Ballet and the performing arts. Of all the creative professions I sometimes think that to nurture a dancer may be the hardest task, requiring the nearly paradoxical distillation and inoculation of the sensitivity to emotion, grace and the physicality and stamina of movement. To convince a child to train for the future and live, absolutely, in the moment, to appreciate the classics and -re-invent style for themselves, is something Frances did naturally.

But for me mostly Frances was a quick wit, a fund of good humour. Hers was the kind of lively curiosity that never wore out or faded, she did an MA in her 80's . On the prospect of he (re) entry into the workforce to pay her HECS fees she was gleefully amused. Her PhD may well appear one day, as might her Victorian novel "The Locket". She lived to be 90 and left life with the swift efficiency of a woman who was independent, generous and so very happy to enjoy herself and others.

Vale

The Other Side of Things - New Audio CD release by River Road Press

The first poem I recorded of V S was the Scissors. On paper this is a poem of considerable charm. In real life VS is a match for his scissors.

Smith's poems are quiet colonisers; they work like his brown coastal ants in the poem Night Life, conveying things from one place to another. If you're lucky the other place will be you. These poems have an adroit resonance, their words and ideas come back, like phrases of music, when you stop to hear yourself think. Smith is often characterised as a lyricist, but this undersells his humour, his satirical eye and vivid imagination. For him an acute observation is very often a point of departure for the real business of the poem. We see this in The Man Fern Near the Bus Stop, where like a fanciful botanical fabulist, Smith conjures a dozen intriguing and accurate puzzles from the fern: a pineapple, an embryonic mouse and a seahorse emerge while an enigmatic slippered man waits near us for the bus that never arrives. (The Tasmanian man fern is known as a tree fern in Sydney) These poems, to paraphrase Smith, are freighted with surprisingly robust fragilities. In the odd way of poetic things, we find these perceptions are sharpened by slight contradictions that bring the whole into finer focus.

But why a CD? Simply to hear a national treasure, a voice that is entirely individual.

The Other Side of Things is Number 9 in the River Road Poetry Series from River Road Press.

Cover photograph on The Other Side of Things by Gabrielle Smith

Cover design by Birdcreative.