Skip to main content

Poem by S.J. Holland-Batt

Eyewear is pleased this Bloomsday to, in antipodean style, feature S.J. Holland-Batt. She was born in Southport, Queensland, grew up in Denver, Colorado, and has been living in St. Lucia, Queensland, as a freelance arts writer for localART.

Her poetry has appeared in Overland, Cultural Studies Review, and was anthologised in 2004 in Straight Out Of Brisbane (SOOB): New Writing. She was recently selected as Vibewire's Poet in Residence. She recently completed a review of a new critical text on Vladimir Nabokov for the American journal Politics and Culture.

I think Ms. Holland-Batt is one of the new voices emerging from Australian poetry we should be keen to follow over the next years, and was glad to feature poetry of hers at Nthposition. Here's a new poem of hers, below:


Hailstorm

We’ve become used to each other—
you don’t yet have a key, but you let yourself
in, and boil the kettle meditatively,

but tonight everything was shaken loose—
we lurched and scuttled in a dazzled haze,
fog rose from the startled asphalt, and

millions of dizzied baubles rattled down,
a wild rush of iced rain, globes like golf
balls or styrofoam meteors clattered down

stairs, shored up against embankments,
tucked into crevices, ripped poinciana leaves
down in a palpable frenzy. Go home, I thought.

Leave, leave, so I’m free to prowl again
the white noiseless streets, to shiver with
the crazed possums leaping along power

lines, to be alone with my cold, with
this religion of frozen things.


poem by S.J. Holland-Batt

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".