Writers

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Things that inspired me were experiences that created an “opening of the field” to use a phrase from Robert Duncan who was one poet who inspired me, both by his poetry and his example. I learned to write by reading poetry and then seeking by out these poets whose work inspired me. Certain teachers have appeared along the way, though they weren’t always the regular kind of teacher. They appeared in many guises, a primary school teacher, an old fisherman, a fishing writer, and a master pastry chef, a priest and a minister, painters and photographers, professors. The others were my eternals: William Blake, Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and several others whose books travel with me everywhere I go.

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From the beginning Francis Webb has sought that ‘so tender voyaging line of truth’, single-mindedly, and with a somewhat disconcerting unawareness of the fashionable poetry of his time. He has been concerned with the same tragic problems as Rilke, Eliot, Pasternak and, to mention a contemporary who presents a close parallel, Robert Lowell. I cannot, after long mediation on his verse, place his achievement on a level lower than that suggested by these names.

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This special issue of Rochford Street Review is dedicated to Robert Adamson. It includes work by and about Bob that has appeared in The Review over the years but it is centred around a number of he essays he delivered while he was the The first Chair in Australian Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), a position that was funded by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL).

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Larry Buttrose is something of a fringe dweller in the landscape of Australian poetry. He was co-editor of two poetry magazines in the 1970s, Dharma and Real Poetry, and published poems in literary magazines, journals and anthologies. He branched out into fiction and nonfiction (ghost-writing the book upon which the film Lion was based) and writing for the stage and screen. His Selected Poems was published in 2017 by BryshaWilson Press in Melbourne.

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There is something about the name a poet chooses to title their collection that will either attract or repel a reader. Most poets nowadays opt for a short and catchy title, something that doesn’t give away too much.Something that proclaims eruditon and an understanding of the zeitgeist. Not to do so is risky, if one wnats to court favour and aplomb. Mick Corrigan goes against the current grain by choosing The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot as title for his debut.

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Linda Adair is a (re)emerging artist (having stopped art making as worklife and family took up her time) and is a poet, writer and a publisher of Rochford Press, and co-editor of the online Rochford Street Review. Her debut poetry collection The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020 by Melbourne Poets Union and her work has been the anthologised in the following collections: To End All Wars, Messages from The Embers, Poetry for the Planet, Pure Slush Volume 25 and the Volume on Work. She has been published in various online and print journals, both in Australia and internationally. She has read her poems at festivals, conferences and venues around the country and has been a featured poet in Cuplet, Newcastle, Live Poets at Don Banks, and will be reading in Poetry at the Pub in Newcastle in late October.

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Cooke wants us to shake us loose from our tired habits of perception, I think, because this is a crucial step towards responding to the challenges of our climate crisis. We have to rethink, and ultimately dissolve, the Man-Nature dichotomy and the implicit sublimation of Nature that shapes every aspect of our interaction with it. And we have to rethink this relationship that is at the very centre of our understanding of being if we are to fashion any kind of meaningful response, or risk losing every speck of brilliance, of imagination, of love and care and growth that has been part of the human experience. That’s not to say these poems are dark and dour, rather they compel urgency by depicting the stakes.

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