Retro Gate

Watergate has a lot to answer for, as soon as wrote 'Retro Gate' that once was a word 'gate'  becomes a suffix for underhand spooks and phone taps.  Unlike this MBC Gate, phone tapping and other assorted forms of eaves dropping, sadly, never goes out of fashion. What happened to good manners? Perhaps it still exists in some vintage form behind this near-bucolic wrought iron gate that leads one on to Mosman Bowling Club. The jaunty paint scheme, the latch and the straight & narrow path all do their bit to reinforce the idea that privacy might be another word for honour.

X to the n

Carol Jenkins's second collection of poetry  Xⁿ is now out, Woo Hoo!
Xⁿ might be the shortest poem possible between two letters, a mathematical metaphor for poetry, shorthand for a process that takes something specific and transforms it into something more intensely itself.
Jenkins’ second collection begins pre-big bang, and proceeds, democratically investigating life. Is she mining the everyday for the sake of linguistic high jinks, or hijacking language to celebrate where we’re at? Here we find a penchant for the absurd, a playful elucidation of everything from the concept of zero to the history of burnt toast, a subversion of historical methods, road trips and set theory, butter and death. Wry and lucid, wide-ranging and witty, this is exactly what you need to read.

So please go directly to via this link to  Puncher & Wattmann's website  where you can buy it. It is also available from Gleebooks, Kinokuniya in Sydney and Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne.

Freesias Concentrating

Leaving aside chrysanthemums and other members of the compisatae family that go from fresh directly to stinky swamp water, there is a point when a vase of flowers which having been sinking past their prime turn start to wither gracefully, roses become crepey, take on a blown beauty, and where these freesias have dried to glassine crisp petals where the colour concentrates, and the litter of fallen racemes and flowers, the pollen dust suggest a homage to things past.