The Green Bell illustrates a life of complete and careless love, and utter grief: author Paula Keogh and poet Michael Dransfield in the early 1970s.
Affirm Press
The lovers at the centre of The Green Bell - its author, Paula Keogh, and that passing meteor of Australian poetry, Michael Dransfield - met in the psychiatric unit of Canberra Hospital.
Pakistan’s rich visual and poetic culture is expressed every day on walls, rickshaws and buses. As the country struggles to offer solace to its people, they carry its narratives and emotions.
Protest poetry has an esteemed history, from the British war poets to writers behind the Iron Curtain. In Perth, poets are protesting against a contentious road extension and their words are charged.
Poets are drawn to the time between seasons and to the time when both death and life, endings and beginnings, merge into each other and confuse us.
Annie Spratt/Unsplash
The beauty and delicacy of the Christmas story become in our consumerist hands a recipe for crassness and sentimentality. No surprise then, that poets are drawn to try to rescue it.
Zimbabwean police beat up a man protesting the reintroduction of local banknotes.
REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo
Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.
A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore.
Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons
In 1913, an Indian literary giant named Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-white person to win the literature prize. He wrote over 2,000 songs and, like Dylan’s, they still resonate today.
In a new collaboration, Paul Kelly has joined singer Camille O'Sullivan and pianist Feargal Murray to set 100 years of Irish poetry to music. As the emerald isle is sung into being, the words of Yeats and Joyce still stand out.
One of the most famous attempted rapes in literature: the nymph Daphne turns into a tree to escape the god Apollo.
Apollo chasing Daphne, Cornelis de Vos, 1630.
There are calls for Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be taught with a trigger warning. This 15-book epic is a rollercoaster of a read, with moments of both delicious joy and abject depravity. Like much great art, it was not created to please.
Adjectives have always been out there, mobs of them pressing on the outside walls, their faces against the windows, their shoulders at the doors. They just want to be inside close to all the nouns that…
What is a society without its poets? If all poetry disappeared from our libraries and shelves and virtual depositories tomorrow, would it make much difference to us? If we were forbidden to write poetry…
Your voice carries your character. You might have a light, strained voice, or you might have a deep, rolling voice, but that is not your voice. It is the prop you were given, and you use it as any good…
Celebrated South African poet Adam Small passed away at the age of 79.
Cape Argus/Independent Newspapers
Black Consciousness activist, Afrikaans poet and revered academic Adam Small has passed away. In his large volume of work he gave voice to the downtrodden – those marginalised by apartheid.