Jane Gleeson-White
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Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, Sydney Writers' Festival 2022
Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, Sydney Writers' Festival 2022

Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, SWF 2022

This was a thrilling session between three poets: Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa in conversation with Evelyn Araluen, who asked searching questions about their beautiful new poetry collections, Beneba Clarke’s How Decent Folk Behave and Musa’s Killernova. It was a stellar panel! Araluen’s first book of poems, Dropbear, had just won the 2022 Stella Award.

Araluen opened by asking when these books were written? Where were they at when they wrote them?

Beneba Clarke said she wrote her book in 2019 and 2020. Because most of the poems were for her weekly poetry gig at The Saturday Paper, it’s the most time-specific work she’s ever written.

Araluen said it reads like an annotation of this period – and in a sense we’re still in that moment, but also not.

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conversation, writers' festival, feminismJane Gleeson-WhiteMaxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Musa, Killernova, How Decent People Behave, Borneo, Hannah Clarke, woodcut, poetry, Australia, Australian poetry, Eveylyn Araluen, Sydney Writers' Festival
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)

In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.

After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?

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books, new book, book reviewJane Gleeson-Whitebook review, books, Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, war', love, trauma, mother, son, poetry, violence, Vietnam, America
The Undying: A meditation on modern illness by Anne Boyer
The Undying: A meditation on modern illness by Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?

That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.

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new book, booksJane Gleeson-Whiteillness, cancer, The Undying, Anne Boyer, poetry, poet, nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize, pain, writing, women's writing