The Best Australian Poems 2013

by Lisa Gorton

  Aden Rolfe is a writer and editor whose practice includes poetry, radio and criticism. His poems have been published in the Age, Best Australian Poems 2011 and Cordite Poetry Review. He was featured in Overland’s Emerging Poets Series, and he is the 2013 recipient of the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry.

  Peter Rose is the author of the award-winning family memoir Rose Boys (2001), just reissued as a Text Classic. He has also published five poetry collections, most recently Crimson Crop (UWA Publishing, 2012), which won a 2012 Queensland Literary Award. He is the editor of Australian Book Review.

  Josephine Rowe is the author of the short-story collections How a Moth Becomes a Boat (Hunter Publishers, 2010) and Tarcutta Wake (UQP, 2012), which was longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She currently lives in Montreal.

  Robyn Rowland has written nine books, including six of poetry. Seasons of doubt & burning: New & selected poems (2010) represents forty years of work. Silence & its tongues (2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize. In 2010 she won the Writing Spirit Poetry Award, Ireland.

  Brendan Ryan grew up on a dairy farm at Panmure, in western Victoria. His second collection of poetry, A Paddock in his Head (Five Islands Press, 2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 ACT Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Travelling Through the Family (Hunter Publishers, 2012). He lives in Geelong, where he teaches English at a secondary college.

  Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2011; also published in the UK as Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 2012) was winner of the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the 2012 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She is poetry editor of the Age and a freelance reviewer.

  Tracy Ryan is a West Australian writer who has also lived in the UK and the USA. She has published seven volumes of poetry, most recently Unearthed (Fremantle Press, 2013). She has also published three novels; a fourth, Claustrophobia, is due to appear in 2014 with Transit Lounge.

  Andrew Sant’s most recent collections of poetry are Tremors: New and Selected Poems (Black Pepper, 2004), Speed & Other Liberties (Salt Publishing, 2008), Fuel (Black Pepper, 2009) and The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems (Black Pepper, 2013). He lives in Melbourne.

  Brenda Saunders has published three collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in selected anthologies and journals. She is a member of DiVerse poets, a group who write and read their ekphrastic poetry at various Sydney art galleries. Brenda recently returned from a Resident Fellowship at CAMAC Arts Centre in France, where she worked on translations of her poetry into French.

  Jaya Savige is the author of Latecomers (UQP, 2005), which won the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and Surface to Air (UQP, 2011). He is a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College, and Lecturer in English at A. C. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury, London. As well as family and friends, he misses Milo, surfing in boardshorts and geckos.

  Mandy Sayer is a novelist, memoirist and short story writer. She has written poetry since the age of six but only began submitting her work for publication in 2011. Her poems have since appeared in the Australian Literary Review and the Australian.

  Oscar Schwartz is currently writing a PhD in philosophy, addressing the question of whether computers are able to write poetry. His work is published online and can be viewed at www.scarschwartz.com.

  Thomas Shapcott was born in 1935 and has had many poems published. His latest book, Parts of Us, was published by UQP in 2010. He is still writing.

  Laura Jan Shore is the author of Breathworks (Dangerously Poetic Press) and Water over Stone (Interactive Press), winner of IP Picks Best Poetry 2011. She won the 2012 Martha Richardson Poetry Prize, the 2009 F. A. W. John Shaw Nielson Award and the 2006 C. J. Dennis Open Poetry Award, and her poetry’s been internationally published.

  Vivian Smith’s most recent book is Here, There and Elsewhere (Giramondo, 2012). He also co-edited Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (Pandanus Press, 2006).

  James Stuart’s first full-length collection of poems, Anonymous Folk Songs, is forthcoming from Vagabond Press. His other book is Imitation Era (Vagabond Press, 2012). He was a 2008 Asialink literature resident in Chengdu, China, and works as a communications manager.

  Maria Takolander is the author of two books of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009) and The End of the World (Giramondo, forthcoming), and a book of short stories, The Double (Text, 2012). She is a senior lecturer in literary studies and professional and creative writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.

  Richard Kelly Tipping currently lives in Sydney, writing a book of anecdotes and working with visual poetry and public sculpture. The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, lists and illustrates more than 100 of his word works through www.artsearch.nga.gov.au. A fat book of his concrete and spoken poems is nearing completion for Puncher & Wattmann in 2014.

  John Tranter has published more than twenty collections of verse. His collection Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected won a number of major prizes. His latest book is Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, 2010). He is the founding editor of the free internet magazine Jacket, and he has a homepage and journal at www.johntranter.net.

  Ann Vickery is a senior lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender (2000) and Stressing the Modern (2007), and co-author (with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman) of The Intimate Archive (2009). She recently guest-edited ‘The Political Imagination’ issue of Southerly with Ali Alizadeh, and edited the ‘Masque’ issue of Cordite Poetry Review.

  Corey Wakeling is the author of Goad Omen (Giramondo, 2013). With Jeremy Balius, Corey co-edited Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press, 2013). He is reviews editor of poetry journal Rabbit, and interviews editor of Cordite.

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe was born in 1934. His first collection of poetry was published in Australia in 1959. He has taught at the universities of Yale, Harvard and Venice, and is now professor emeritus in the Australian Centre at Melbourne University. Carcanet has published his New and Selected Poems (2013) and seven previous collections.

  Alan Wearne continues assembling his verse narratives with forays into sonnets, villanelles and ballades. His friend, exemplary poet John Forbes, died the day the gangster Alphonse Gangitano was buried; their careers form strands in Alan’s sequence ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’, which is, in part, his elegy for John.

  Gemma White lives in Melbourne. She is a painter, poet, editor and founder of Only Words Apart Media (www.owamedia.com). Her work has appeared in magazines, anthologies and journals, including the Age and Award Winning Australian Writing 2011. Her first book of poetry, Furniture Is Disappearing, is due for release next year with IP.

  Petra White’s books are The Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007) and The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010), which won the Grace Leven Prize. She lives in Melbourne.

  Jessica L. Wilkinson’s first poetry book, marionette: a biography of miss marion davies, was published by Vagabond Press in 2012. Her second book, Suite for Percy Grainger, will be published by Vagabond in 2014. She is the editor-in-chief of Rabbit: a journal for non-fiction poetry.

  R. D. (Robert) Wood is a writer who has had work published in Australia, the United Kingdom, India and the United States. He is currently working on an uncreative chapbook.

  Fiona Wright is a doctoral candidate with the University of Western Sydney Writing & Society Research Centre. Her poetry collection Knuckled (2011) won the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for a first collection in 2012.

  Ouyang Yu came to Australia at the age of thirty-five. Now fifty-eight, he has published seventy-one books in English and Chinese languages, including his collection of English poetry The Kingsbury Tales: A Complete Collection (2012), his collection of English-Chinese bilingual poetry Self Translation (2012), a
nd his translation into Chinese of The Fatal Shore (forthcoming in 2014).