Louise Wakeling was MC for the launch of Alchemy of the Sun by Margaret Bradstock, Puncher & Wattmann 2024. Here she discusses the collection and introduces Marcelle Freiman who formally launched the collection

Welcome, everyone, to the launch of Margaret Bradstock’s latest and ninth poetry collection Alchemy of the Sun, published by David Musgrave of Puncher & Wattmann. Puncher & Wattmann are one of the main outlets for publishing poetry in Australia, and I think the best. There would be quite a few poets nationally who feel immensely grateful for that support. David will be selling copies of the book up the back, so be sure to grab one if you haven’t already.

The American poet, Glenis Redmond, Poet Laureate in South Carolina, believes that poets are the canaries in the mine. She sees poets as empaths, town criers. Unlike the original canaries who collapsed when they breathed carbon monoxide, thereby warning the miners to get out, Redmond sees poets as those individuals who persist in giving voice, and won’t be silenced:

We, canaries at the mouth of mines
flash golden while detecting poison
singing warning.
We don’t die
We write

Margaret is a significant voice in Australian poetry, one who has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Some of her recent poems have been used as libretti in Luke Styles’ contemporary music, and performed in both Sydney and Paris. In previous lives, she has been a senior lecturer, a visiting scholar in China, and an editor and co-editor of many anthologies, including Antipodes and Caring for Country. She was also a birthday girl yesterday, so many happy returns, Margaret – may there be many more.

Margaret is a snorkeller par excellence, regularly swimming with wobbegongs, sea urchins and gropers in Clovelly Bay – the blue variety, that is. Poems such as “How large each death will be” and “Altered Carbon” give us a glimpse of an underwater perspective, a temporary refuge from a world beset with Covid lockdowns, climate change and species threatened with extinction.

Margaret’ s also a bike rider, exercise fiend, voracious reader, mother and grandmother. All of these selves are reflected in some way or other in her latest collection, such as the last poem, “Meeting Remi”, dedicated to our mutual granddaughter, who might also be heard giving voice this afternoon. In this poem, the poet’s acute awareness of the Ferryman waiting for her in the shadows is counter-balanced by delight at a new being starting out on life’s journey, as well as appreciating, in her words, “ the hunger to remain, the wonder of each new life a reason.”

Like many poet-survivors, Margaret has steadily pursued her interest in verse over many decades. Her passion for engaging with the world’s doings and with human experience in all its manifestations hasn’t lessened with the passing years, though it must be said that sometimes her vision inclines to the dark side. There are poems, for instance, on oceans devoid of fish, seas teeming with junk and discarded fishing lines, on the way dementia unravels a human being, poems on the impact on ordinary people of the Covid pandemic and Tsunamis and war. But that’s the reality of our world. A physical survivor, and a tenacious, not to say stubborn, individual, she just keeps on keeping on. That should be an inspiration to us all, whatever our goals in life.

To give you an idea of how rusted-on Margaret is as a poet, when I asked her recently if she’d put herself through the agony of getting a book together again, especially pulling together another launch, her reply was: “You’ve got to do it if you’re writing to an audience. There’s little point in writing in a void. You don’t write for yourself: the best way to reach people is to get a book out. And thank god we’ve got family who want our books”, she quipped. She takes comfort in the fact that her earlier books are still selling, even if it’s for $7 a copy! “Yes”, she said definitively, “if I’m alive still, I’ll do it again.” I don’t think she could imagine not writing. Be warned, David!

Part of the agony, of course, is the anxious thought, “What if I held a launch and nobody came?” So it’s good to see that those present have prioritised poetry enough to brave the on-off, drizzly, icy weather and gather in warm place like the Friend in Hand to celebrate poetry.

Margaret will, of course. read a selection of her poems after Marcelle’s launch speech, poems which reflect on the experience of country, both past and present, national and personal. The opening sequence of poems on the colonial project of the desert explorers is a memorable one; in the opening section, ‘Deserts of the mind’, Margaret skewers with delicious irony the delusions of men who planted flags on country they barely understood, and frequently failed to survive in.

Other poems, in the section ‘Warming Melting, Dying’, for instance, evoke an elegiac feeling, a sadness at the human-induced physical decline of our blue world, our only home, while in the final section, ‘Going Viral’, in poems like “Big brother rules the waves”, the persona voices more personal concerns, such as a visit to the beach during lockdown, where the only freedom seems to be under the waves: “the fish”, she notices, “aren’t distancing themselves”. In “Poem for my Daughter”, a mother, feeling broken, plays Scrabble at the Mater with a daughter undergoing chemo. The poem “Rescue Dog” celebrates the mutual comfort provided by Guapa, or Guapita, when our son Jesse was separated from his partner Lizeth in Colombia during the pandemic.

 Guapa takes a flying leap
over the lunch-table, onto his lap
a leap of faith, a sure landing.
He’s hers, beyond all doubt,
her safety net,
and she’s his.

So, that’s Margaret: unlike those deluded explorers and the unfortunate canaries, she’s stayin’ alive, still giving voice, speaking up for the environment, detecting and calling out poison, still writing poetry.

Marcelle Freiman will formally launch Alchemy of the Sun and share with us her insights into Margaret’s poetry. Marcelle is a published poet and researcher, as well as an Honorary Associate Professor at Macquarie University. She is also a valued member of our RoundTable poetry workshop, which has been meeting in one form or other for decades.

She has published articles on the practice and theory of creative writing and on poetry and poetics, with a specialty in ekphrasis. Her interest in that form is another link between us today – Margaret, Marcelle and I have often read poetry together as part of the ekphrastic group DiVerse. It’s great to hook up again to celebrate Margaret’s latest contribution to Australian poetry.

Marcelle’s research has appeared in TEXT, Axon, and New Writing. Her current poetry project is a verse memoir. Marcelle’s third book of poetry Spirit Level was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. Her second book White Lines (Vertical) was awarded the Woollahra Literary Prize, and her first, Monkey’s Wedding, was highly commended for the ASAL Mary Gilmore award.

For over two decades, her poems have appeared in anthologies and literary journals, mostly in Australia, including in Antipodes (US), Axon, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Meniscus, Meanjin, Southerly, StylusLit, Transnational Literature, and Westerly. Her poems have twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize 

Please welcome Marcelle Freiman.

Observations of everything: Marcelle Freiman launches Margaret Bradstock’s 'Alchemy of the Sun'

Margaret Bradstock: 3 Poems

P76 Issue 9. Margaret Bradstock – ‘The Homecoming’

 – Louise Wakeling

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Louise Wakeling is a Sydney poet who lives in the Blue Mountains. Off Limits (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021) is her fourth collection of poetry.  Wakeling currently alternates between writing poetry, casual English teaching and working on a second novel about coercive control and intergenerational trauma in the lives of three generations of women in Sydney and on the NSW Central Coast.

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Alchemy of the Sun by Margaret Bradstock is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/alchemy-of-the-sun/

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