Bronwyn Rodden (right) with  Lizz Murphy at the Flying Islands launch at the 2025 Newcastle Writers Festival.

Stranded, by Bronwyn Rodden, Flying Islands Press 2024, was launched by John Bennett at the Newcastle Writers Festival on Saturday 5 April at the Watt Space Gallery.

Bronwyn has published 5 novels, 3 collections of short fiction and one of poetry. She was also a finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize, 2023. And her short stories have, in the last few months, had a run of success. She is represented in the Centenary Anthology of the Society of Women Writers. Stranded is her first professionally published book.

A big thank you to the absent Kit Kelen for the hard yakka he has put into promoting poetry and poets. And it’s great to be here, we missed the original launch at Markwell with Covid!

Bronwyn’s  poems are alive, they talk to us. Often as quiet presences that draw us into a life from childhood on. She left home early. Her poems can be fierce and poignant regarding family dynamics. They also reflect the grit of the world, as when she visits her parent’s Ireland for the first time. From a Dublin hostel:

Someone has drawn a chain of tiny penises above
my pillow. I worry about money. A cloud shifts
behind the Haiku leaves and they silhouette.
My pen-knife lies open on my towel, still red
from Zambezi mud. A Welsh football team
is moving in and flaunting their all-rightness
with loud, flecked voices . . .
Outside a man sings ‘Not at all, not at all’
in just the right way. ‘Jim knows nothing about
women,’ said his wife (not Molly but almost).
Someone hums the beginning of Sunshine of your
Love. ‘Mothers Day cards. Cheap.’ ‘50p. cheap.’
‘Cigreet lighters four f’ra Punt’,
the pramsellers move on.

Many poems derive from journal entries with honed perceptions, keen eyed encounters, often open ended. Take the poem ‘Bulahdelah’:

Clouds wipe us out
we have no shadows
head for the carnival rotunda
and look out into them
wait for the burst
cool wet
white ducks languish
on the river shore.
Locals talk
it’s four years since the last flood
we’ve been here five years now
this bloke keeps looking at me
just in case, he’s got that
still drunk from last night old black
pants no shirt look: great.
There’s a round gold tree
with a square shadow
in the strip of sunlight left
across the plain.

Sensitivity to place runs through the collection. Then there’s surprises, like the poem ‘Monster’. Reminding me Bronwyn has four poems in last year’s International Anthology of Surrealist And Magical Realist Poetry from the US.

Congratulations to my partner. I feel lucky that she has dedicated this collection to me.

 – John Bennett

 ————————————-

John Bennett is a widely published poet who has won major Australian prizes and published five books. He has a PhD in poetics and has written and taught ecological literature and thinking at university and continuing education centres. He was Artistic Director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival and worked with Aboriginal storytellers for the Saltwater Freshwater Arts Alliance. John won the Mattara (now Newcastle) Poetry Prize in 1989 and the inaugural David Tribe Poetry Prize in 2008. He was runner-up in the New Shoots Sydney Poetry Prize, Red Room Poetry, 2016.

Stranded by Bronwyn Rodden is available from https://flyingislands pocketpoets. com.au/product/ stranded/

.