contents

A thanks to Pam Brown

When Pam Brown, Overland's poetry editor of the past five years, first took up this key role at the magazine, she succeeded some distinguished precursors.

Barrett Reid selected poetry in Overland's early years after 1954, when founding editor, Stephen Murray-Smith, was at the helm. From time to time, Barrie also sought input from Robert Harris and others.

When Barrie became editor in 1988, after Overland 112, he handed the laurel wand (which could sometimes be a thorny one) on to Michael Dugan. During this time, Barrie also sought occasional input from Shelton Lea, myself and others.

Michael continued to select poetry after John McLaren became editor in 1993 (for Overland 131-147) and for the early period of Ian Syson's stewardship, beginning in 1997, up until Overland 149.

Pam Brown was formally listed as Poetry Editor in Overland 151, winter 1998. Previously, the role had not been publicly defined and was even sometimes shared between several people, with ad hoc input from Overland's 'extended family' of editorial helpers, although Michael Dugan, tirelessly and always meticulously, did the lion's share of this work.

Obviously, it was a good move to define the role more closely, and for a woman with Pam's outstanding poetic credentials to take it up. Her tenure has left a strong mark on the magazine. Looking back over Overland 151-169, her criteria become clear. Firstly, she has insisted on quality, selecting the best from the many currents, tendencies and approaches in Australian poetry today.

I won't name individual poets Pam has included in Overland (there are too many), but they collectively constitute a big chunk of the best Australia now has to offer.

There has been a good balance between men and women poets of all age groups and a reflection of Australia's great community, ethnic and cultural diversity, including poems in translation.

Broadly, the sentiments, ideas and insights expressed in most poems, as you might expect from Overland, reflect the intellectually acute and socially progressive side of the political spectrum. But simple slogans crudely delivered, or tired genuflections to opinions, no matter how strongly one might also share them, have cut little mustard.

Pam has demonstrated a parallel and tough-nosed insistence on aesthetic values, on a contemporary, cutting-edge feel and relevance, great technical assurance and, often, those bold innovations and experiments that help to advance the art of poetry, maintaining it as the 'r and d' of our literature.

Now that she has bowed out, Pam Brown's shoes will be hard to fill, but that challenging and rewarding task now goes to John Leonard. He joins a new editorial team—with Nathan Hollier and Katherine Wilson taking over from Ian Syson.

Before wishing John Leonard the best, however, a point of clarification.

There are two people named John Leonard who are connected with Australian poetry, and they are often confused with each other. One is the highly accomplished poetry anthologist and editor, formerly living in Kuranda and now re-settled in Melbourne, but not a poet himself. The second is definitely a practitioner, and Overland's new Poetry Editor. And we wish him all the best.

Louis Armand

laggers point
(trial bay)

reverence for the past / order
is broken: from the crumbling sea wall
------the rocky headland . . .
"one man’s
labour was sometimes required
for nine days
on the preparation of an individual block" / asking if it is
cut through, that we might
proceed to the further
promontory—& failing that, . . . the outward
------------------------trajectory of a
------------------------captive mind; the escape route
------------------------futile as the imagined
------------------------"safe haven" / work-in-progress
tasking
------the strength of the undertow—& the breakwater
washed out at almost the rate of con-
------------------------------------------struction

Louis Armand

the realism i allude to may creep out
in spite of the author’s views
----------------------------– friedrich engels

from "Notes on Incarceration, Geography"

the real significance of this antagonism . . . "see life
as penetrable landscape illuminated
-----------------from above"—is mortality, is the
particular habit of confessional

turning it over &
over in the palm of the mind—one side
resembling the other
in substance only (greyish yellow

dolomite / that it was born of this earth & not of specula-
tion / disaster
repeating itself speaks of
transcendence ("in-

dividual natures
are part of the whole"—& yet it
--------------------------h----raises the question
--------------------------h----of its purpose &

--------------------------h----sufficiency / as one
raises the alarm or is left to pass off
indifferently (the scapegoat cutting a
ridiculous figure / paraded
on the quay, "as if to rectify
--------------------------h---- what cannot be rectified"

Andrea Sherwood

Ode to Joy

There’s always joy
to keep you scorching
at both ends, the hot palms,
the infinite.
Lightening wouldn’t stop you, not
on this, this maniac.
I’m so drowned in love
I want to wash it off, skilled silk
the thrill, a pour over
of your own, sheer
as the nearest.
A tingling body sells well,
for a price. Desire costs even
the true heart. I was once on methadone,
now I’m on bruprenorphine.
There’s a truism; beauty
is all you need to know.

Aidan Coleman

The Wedding Plan

Your family have seen the film,
some read the book—

they cried buckets—
but apparently love is no argument.

We’ve tried ‘happy’, but it’s not on their grid.
Your sister’s done the maths

for liberation:
fifteen lovers before you’re thirty;

you can maybe marry then.
Your mother, desperate to find a clause,

offers washer and dryer, a TV, if only
we’ll wait

the length of a warranty.
Your father finds, in me, a mine

of talkback gold.
But still they’ll choose the cake

and eat it—
run the wedding,

try to talk you out of it.
This is why I could just about

marry out of spite.
They’ve planned a holding operation:

hired ushers,
an actor for the ‘speak now

or forever . . .’
and a car outside

with the motor running,
tickets to anywhere.

Cathy Young

Knitting Blue
[Outsourcing—1993, SA]

I’m knitting blue
mohair with a large white
Sydney Opera House motif
either side of button bands
finished off with 1½ inch
red white and blue jester buttons
white knitted knots scatter rest of garment
size extra large
70 hours it will take me to knit this creation
my time limit 3 weeks 60 dollars I will be paid
for the parcel of wool and
many times used-photocopy graph that
arrived after I answered the earn money at home ad
and sent in a sample of circle square triangle
intarsia method no fair isle thank you very much

I knit at night
my plastic needles don’t click
as steel don’t disturb
the family TV viewing
I knit counting 10 blue 3 white 2 blue whatever
it is my elbows that drive them mad as
I flap in my corner of the couch
an overgrown baby bird trapped in the nest
I knit all day
at the kitchen table
a growing blanket of wool warming
stomach thighs knees
my eyes focused on
the creased and faded pattern
a ruler marking the place
a pencil the finished row
stopping to cook tea
vegie something or other
mashed potato and blue mohair

For convenience
I can post finished merchandise back
and wait for payment with next order
out of necessity
I take the train
and wait with 6 other women
average age 70 at a guess
for stitching and collars and arm lengths and left over wool
to be checked
I find out this apparel
will sell for $370 at The Rocks
$340 on the Gold Coast
that when they are satisfied with my skills
I can do a well known Mouse Down Under
I will get 70 dollars for Mousey with Skippy and Opera House and
--- -Harbour Bridge
combined knotted pocketed cabled patched moss stitch bands
and my sample will be sewn with others’
into a really mod garment
for sale no pay

The manager needs to discuss my contract
they were going to post it out but
seeing as I’m here
I can sign right now
and the money from this number
goes towards payment for materials
which will be reimbursed
when I terminate with the company
you know when tears take over your eyeballs and
that stinging hot rush fills nostrils and throat
as your skin feels it’s sweating blood
like when Centrelink payments won’t be in your account until after lunch
and you’re the first customer of the day
and it’s starting to rain and you’ve no train fare home
and the child in the pusher is crying
and you’ve run out of smokes
I was wilder than that
I looked at the old dears collecting their goods
the may as well be paid while I’m watching TV knitters
the it’s lonely at night since my husband’s passed on ladies
the $60 won’t affect my pension household managers
living spectres of (my) future times then
as cool as you please my livid mouth said
I want my money now thank you very much
you can stick your contract (I hate begging for my pay)
then clutching a quickly drawn up cheque
f’n mongrelled my way out of that place
feeling black

Dîpti Saravanamuttu

Millennium

For Eastern Europe

An old man, his body
lean from seasons of toil and age
is calling, across the fields of his family
to his son, hiding in the mountains:
he calls his name, and yells to him
in a voice too large for his sinewy body,
to not be afraid of the Serbians.

In the ‘post-apartheid’ globe, I wish
Dubrovnik were still the most beautiful city
in the whole of eastern Europe.
I wish I had seen it, and that bridge
that is called the Star of Mostar.

Millions of books and manuscripts
of Islamic and Jewish history are burnt,
catholic cathedrals, medieval mosques,
the National Museum and the National Library.

A pair of old wellington boots is found
upturned to the sky. As though we are
condemned to the prison of our prisoners.
The parody of communism, that burns down
everyone else’s religious sanctuaries, in an
endless response to each other’s cruelty.

The UN prowls about, doing as little
as a lion with no teeth—some in the west
pray for the children. Three brothers,
all in their sixties, die together
their bodies are found
face upward to the empty sky.

Shortly before his death,
across the fields of his family
an emaciated man is calling,
with a voice too large for his body,
to his son, hiding in the mountains.
He calls him by name, and yells out
that he must return home
and that he should not fear.

Cassie Lewis

‘Wild Geese Fly

in perfect order.’
That’s your line, and this poem
shares its strategy.
Ironies of freedom,
logic’s grace. Lucid
as we are compressed.

Age seventeen. Clouds of rain seeping
under a lost kitchen door,
bringing life freshly made.

Or the salt-worn wooden eaves
of a shelter we find
at the beach. Fish & chips,
our legs dangling
and joy unabridged.

Laughing upside-down
in the gutter
on Lygon Street.

Ten years have passed
but you’re still part
of why I cannot sleep.
Sadness bonds this wretched comfort
to the floor, and I long for the beat
of exile.

Inhale the pure haze
of what we shared—
the first time I wept in public,
the first time I did not.

Quoting Orwell, to myself,
to be understood is better
than to be loved.

D.J. Huppatz

escarpment

suddenly you’re in it: wheatgrass & feathery snowtops
stretched over wind, syllables flowering in crevices.
chalky cloudwhite scratched onto translucent blue. stand
here long enough & you will bow & shrink balding too.
squirt of birdsqueak. this is a shutter story, framed by
National Geographic in conjunction with National Parks
& Wildlife: see a vista, naturally.

wildlife undocumented (absence in the wallaby zone).
"a little more light," he said. that jetty into the reeds,
what does it mean? counterpoint pitched across
stonewards the unclassified birds. Phylidonyris the
pollinator, collecting nectar. wind is chorus, your scarp
is a scrap of text, a sprayed spectrum of
unreconstructable writing.

they emerge from inside the cliff-face, drawn to
exposure. one is a strangling flower-vine urge: sweet
scourge of blackberries entangling eucalypt dryads of
indeterminate gender. the other is an ochre rubbing.
these invisible visions, are they clear to you now? pull
down that exaggerated sky, tongue these prosthetic
organisms to orgasm.

find a way out through abrasives (windspray, breath),
restore colour to surfaces of exposed flesh enfolding
fencelines, trees, a New Holland Honeyeater. that jetty
reads, what does it? a brief moving vertical along
willed-erness track that clears to a murmur, a fragment
of memory unplaceable which connects somehow to the
sun, a vertical memory that keeps you upright.

James Lucas

The Way That We Read Europeans

Cobbled round a fountain I was pushing through a tide
of rising pigeons to a café table where a burgher sipping
reused grounds was toying with a stale biscotti, definitively
old-world every inch the actor and inspiring confidence

he could deliver on the script. On cue out of nowhere
sliding through the flower-stall a vespa stalled, coughing up
a gravelburnt stand-in for the anarchist, the old man's nephew.
To be honest their dialogue lacked zip. We were trying

to recall the café patrons' faces from the dentist's Paris Match,
scanning newsstands stocked with month-old papers. Headlines
said the nephew had absconded with a self-described actress:
well-shod we thought but too inclined to dunk her biscuit?

That first evening she'd play dutiful niece, preparing supper
for a screening of the daily rushes, not knowing the subtitling
team's absence meant that nothing could be eaten.
Guest-stars predictably threw tantrums. In the end the project

was re-jigged as travelogue art history. Locations found
a chapel with an ossuary lending trinket glass a gravitas.
We wouldn't buy it. We wanted to go back to the old man
at the café, argued that the vespa crash had never happened.

We didn't like him as the bookish pedant, wanted him
descending without interruption in a lineage from village craftsmen.
Or we'd compromise, accept him as a po-faced ferry captain
living off his contraband, freeing the odd dissident.

But we demanded that the niece be genuine, a stranger
to bordellos, her rise to elegance beyond recriminations.
We wanted their faces effortlessly to assume the anguish
and refinement that we'd seen first hand in black and

white TV ads that sell Melbourne as our European city.

Peter Boyle

Paralysis
(1955)

Laid out flat
in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed
I look up:
the leaves are immense,
green and golden with clear summer light
breaking through—
though I turn only my neck
I can see all of them
along this avenue that has no limits.

What does it matter
that I am only eyes
if I am to be carried
so lighly
under the trees of the world?
From beyond thenumbness of my strange body
the wealth of the leaves
falls forever
into my small still watching.

Brian Henry

Skin

Never mind the fantasy about the tweezers and the tongue,
the one about the bicycle pump and the twisted rim.
Never mind the angle of penetration, or the number
of repetitions in the blessed series of withdrawals and givings-in.
Never mind the dream about the bean bag chair and the virgin,
the one about the tree and the bull terrier off its chain.
Never mind the song the words will not attach to,
the visions that arrive with the noises next door,
when a sneeze, or a sob, is mistaken for something else
and someone finds himself clinging to the wall,
perhaps with a glass to his ear, or his glasses on,
hoping something dark and old-fashioned has pulled him
from sleep this close to dawn. Never mind the crack
between the blinds and the sill, where a single moan
will keep him waiting an hour for another, his face pressed
against the pane, one eye open, half-blind but guided.
And never mind the woman in the grass beneath the statue.
Her palms are cupping her head, her skirt an inch off-centre,
glasses gleaming as the sun hums on the monument
of the general, the sking of her arms slowly going red.

Jill Jones

Smoke and water

Taxis and little dramas—
the night is levied
with their signals:
vacant, full, rushing
passengers to the huge room.
Its illuminations stake
out with bright lines
movements of those
who think we are driving
deep into the night,
that huge cave
or mountain hall,
exposing our husky hearts
to the residue
of some surviving ritual
offering promise, expanding
our dancing frames.

Our eyes made wide, slammed up
against the wall of music.
The sound is twisted round
a thudding spine.
The beats can’t escape,
the DJ never intended
that kind of freedom.

Intentions don’t matter here,
only what wrestles
your veins and your head.
This world is made
of muscle and drugs.

Nearly everyone smiles
except the alcoholics
in the corner, too impressed
with their leather harnesses
to realise it’s a positive
world here,
in all senses.
Even what we see
is cut with light that swings
from watchtowers.
But we make the trap,
bait it with our own breath
now combining with smoke
and water
as the bitter dew
from our exertions
clothes us in
a skin of success.

A form of forgetfulness
skirts the edges then
gathers partners.
We drown in drumbeats,
speed and ecstasy rise through skins
of presence, voices
of the other years, harder
to conjure than the riffs
of old songs
bouncing off walls in the back
room of our memory
before dawn clouds intrude
and the sun’s harsh vitamin
pushes through into
our new day’s eyes.

Sing halleluia and stomp
all over sleep.
It may get you sooner.
By morning in sunlight,
it’s later than we think.

Sheila E. Murphy

Fraser Island Pantoum

Random fluctuations of the wind gift eloquence to land,
Extract gel blue cadenzas from sand’s midnight.
In my heart versus in sleep there is no winter.
All the trinket birds desist from leavening my hearing sense of sight,

Extract gel blue cadenzas from sand’s midnight.
Stamina becomes the consummate attention.
All the trinket birds desist from leavening my hearing sense of sight,
While dingoes lope along the beach with reputations.

Stamina becomes the consummate attention.
In motion, reciprocity spirals an infinity of magnets.
Dingoes lope along the beach with reputations.
I am a sotto voce city girl at rest.

In motion, reciprocity spirals an infinity of magnets.
Moments between my self and anyone begin within repeat signs.
I am a sotto voce city girl at rest.
Scribbles on gum trees speak to me in fluent seeds.

Moments between my self and anyone begin within repeat signs.
Rust shows muscle as the flesh of flowers.
Scribbles on gum trees speak to me in fluent seeds.
What following protection of the woods is left to flow?

Rust shows muscle as the flesh of flowers.
We have left sentences with ships in them where water seams the sand.
What following protection of the woods is left to flow?
Seeds, flush with nourishment or poison.

We have left sentences with ships in them where water seams the sand.
It is our nature to be rich in relaxation.
Seeds, flush with nourishment or poison.
Quondongs simplify into a currency.

It is our nature to be rich in relaxation.
Sandblows are found poems.
Quondongs simplify into a currency,
As satinays confirm sweet views beyond scrublands.

Sandblows are found poems.
We sculpt ephemera into relationships,
As satinays confirm sweet views beyond scrublands.
A turquoise color strains unwanted thought from near physical infinity.

We sculpt ephemera into relationships.
In my heart versus in sleep there is no winter.
A turquoise color strains unwanted thought from near physical infinity.
Random fluctuations of the wind gift eloquence to land.

John Mateer

To Alan Bond

----------------When my father died
I thought of you.

----------------You are the myth of Ned Kelly.

You painted a huge red dingo beside the highway.
Mudrooroo says that devil
eats people spits them out as limestone
You won the Yacht Race
and Fremantle facades were preserved and painted
Ours was the home of the Americas Cup
All around the world they heard of Perth
More millionaires and boats per capita
than anywhere else on the planet
Fringe dwellers in Swan Valley, a small Soweto
And the PM declared that day a national holiday
You had an audience with the Pope
and were photographed kneeling
You lost something, billions
You lost your memory, you lost a face . . .

As Ned your head's a fat letterbox.

You had a heart attack, regained your memory
Maybe not . . . You married Bliss, and
like those safety-deposit boxes under the ground
of Saint George's Terrace, your secret's
more obscure than the Ancients,
more questionable than a child-eating dingo.

--------When my father died
I thought of you.

--------How much can you steal from the dying?

--------How many times will you kiss
the Pope's ring for absolution?

--------When my father died
the nurse hugged me. I felt erotic.

I thought of you.