Poet Peter Frankis launched Ron Pretty’s 101 POEMS at the South Coast Writers Centre at Coledale NSW on Sunday 28th August.
Ron led the large audience through a colourful account of his life and times, pausing for Peter to read poems from every stage of his storied poetic career.
A landmark collection of ‘greatest hits’ from one of Australian poetry’s enduring masters.
‘A memorable night of cake and laughter and poetry at the Royal Oak in Balmain as the legendary Judith Beveridge launches Ordinary Time by Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy. Warm thanks to Dan Jordon and Roaring Stories bookshop for hosting the event. Watch the whole show on YouTube real soon now, and buy the book here!’
Save the date!
BOOK LAUNCH: 101 POEMS
Sunday, August 28
2.30pm–4.30pm
South Coast Writers Centre, Coledale
Ron Pretty has been writing and publishing poetry for more than 50 years. In that time he has featured in many journals and anthologies, published 15 books and chapbooks and read his poetry in Australia, UK, USA and Europe. From 1973 to 2007 he ran Five Islands Press and published 230 books by Australian poets during that time.
On August 28 he will launch his new and selected collection, called 101 Poems at the South Coast Writers Centre in Coledale on August 28. The book is published by Pitt Street Poetry. It contains a selection of the best poems from his earlier collections, plus a selection of new poems. It will be his last published collection.
Peter Francis will be MC. Entry is free and refreshments will be provided. The RRP for 101 Poems is $32.00, but it will be sold at the launch for $25.00.
I hope to see you there!
Ron Pretty
Ordinary Time by Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy
“I don’t know if I can tell you the truth. What if truth were prismatic, everyone looking through fruit-coloured panes?”
So begins a conversation between two people who have never met. Join Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy on a lyrical journey through time and space, exploring themes of impermanence, distance, extinction, friendship and love, through the natural and imagined landscapes of time travel.
Information about the book launch can be found here
Time has flown, flown faster than a weaver’s shuttle, which apparently is pretty jolly fast.
So now it’s time to welcome a raft of new poetry books to the Pitt Street Poetry stable for 2018.
First up this year is Rainforest, a fine fourth collection from Eileen Chong, launched by Felicity Plunkett in Sydney before a crowd of 70+ on Saturday 5th May at the Stanley Street Gallery – and on Monday 7th May in Canberra by Melinda Smith at the eponymous Smith’s Alternative That Poetry Thing. Seventy more people, they say, and around eighty books sold across the two events. Nice.
On Sunday afternoon, 3rd June at Gleebooks two more new books will join the ranks: Distance – a first collection from Simeon Kronenberg, to be launched by Anthony Lawrence. And 101 Poems, a ‘selected’ from the self-same Anthony Lawrence, presenting his greatest hits from 15 poetry books published over the last 30 years, to be launched by legendary Puncher & Wattmann publisher poet David Musgrave. This is the second volume in our new 101 Poems series which kicked off with one from John Foulcher back in 2016.
Later on in 2018 we’ll be pleased as Punch(er) to bring you new collections from Lesley Lebkowicz and Geoff Page.
Finally, coming up to the end of the year, we’ll delightedly welcome Felicity Punkett to the Pitt Street Poetry family with her first collection since the storied Vanishing Point, published by UQP in 2009, which won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize.
Six very different poetry books from six fine Pitt Street Poets, and each costing pretty much the same as a seafood pizza.
Delectable!
A prolonged radio silence, you mutter. Not very poetic.
Well yes and no. The latter months of 2015 saw Pitt Street Poetry not so much in the pits as more of a long, deep slough of despond. One half of the cissexual team who form the engine room of the imprint crashed into intensive care and six exquisitely uncomfortable subsequent hospital weeks. The other, stronger (i.e. biologically female) half clustered around with food and empathy, then dashed solo to Chennai for the three day nuptials of their eldest. Préparez vos mouchoirs, folks. But once that silent tear has been shed, get out your Paypal virtual wallets as well, because in the midst of all that we managed to produce three of our finest poetry offerings yet.
Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro and Honk if you are Jesus are cherished rites of passage for every Aussie literary coming of age. But like Luke Davies, Clive James and so many other flaneurs, he is first and foremost a poet. The other creative outflows – novels, medicine, literary politics and the rest – are minor branch vessels leading from the great wide pounding aorta of poetry. His new book for PSP The Rise of the Machines and other love poems collects all the poetry Goldsworthy has written in the 21st century. It has been welcomed with a fine careless rapture by the Herald, the Age, the ABR and all the usual suspects, even those more usually resistant to the odd love poem:
Distracted, I speak to you out loud
in the empty car, old news I forgot to mention
before. When our conversation ends
I am alone again, but in another suburb, lost
and unremembering. Somehow retracing
my trail of miles to our supermarket,
I pay for bread and milk but walk out,
talking to you more quietly, but leaving
the staples of life on the counter.
A shopgirl chases me to the carpark
and hands them over, keeping
her distance, thinking from the way
I move my lips that I have lost my mind
when all along it was only my heart.
Then in November a double launch in Canberra at the Civic Library. A new collection from Geoff Page is always an event, and Gods and Uncles finds him at the top of his redoubtable form. We were there at Adelaide Writers week in March 2014 when Peter Goers, Adelaide ABC local radio evenings legend, quizzed him about his life and work – but were unprepared when Goers anointed him “Australia’s greatest living poet”. But entirely unsurprised. This new book moves from wry, chuckling takes on family and friends, on the nature of the shirt and the status of ballroom dancing in 1942, deftly through from the avuncular to the divine:
Quotidian is all:
the way the weather was,
a late-night red across the palate,
afternoons of sweat and skin,
the timbre of a saxophone,
the quality of light at dawn
across the lotus pond.
The other Canberra launch was a new venture for Pitt Street Poetry – a volume of selected poems, with (don’t look now) a black cover instead of a white one. Who better than John Foulcher, oldest of friends, loyalest of supporters, finest of poets, and importantly the geezer who launched the imprint back in 2012 with a reprint of his debut classic Light Pressure (1982) and his profound Parisian The Sunset Assumption. Foulcher’s 101 Poems collects his best work, published in nine slender volumes over 30 years. For the first time the reader can savour, in a single book, the affectionate nods to the bush, the schoolyard and family, the quiet moments of transcendence, and that quirky, jokey, self-deprecating eye for the absurd which are the hallmarks of his work.
Voices have pierced the concrete,
they riddle me with memory.
She lies transfigured. I wait
and with my other hand
reach up, touch fingers wriggling
from the slab. Something is whispered.
I remember tears, afternoons.
Soon there will be the night air,
the flashes of wind, cameras waiting
with my future. Though I have
only this day, this moment.
I have raised my hand from black water,
I have felt the diminishing ripples
lapping at me. I have listened,
I have heard the quiet sentences.
All three books are available in the best poetry bookshops pretty much everywhere, but why not click on the link and buy them all on line now?
And seeing as how we’re back in dark harness, watch this space.
2016 promises to be the best year yet for Pitt Street Poetry…