E. A. Gleeson has that rare talent of lifting a moment of intimacy into the realm of universal truth, of capturing instances of recollection and infusing them with emotion and thoughtful language where every word gleams.
Maisie and the Black Cat Band is her second award winning book with IP. The first, In Between the Dancing, won the IP Best Poetry Award, while this one was Highly Commended in the 2011 Awards.
E. A. Gleeson was born at Coleraine and lived the first six months of her life in her grandmother’s home at Wootong Vale. The rest of her childhood was spent on a Soldier Settlement farm near Camperdown in Victoria’s Western District. Since then, she has travelled widely. She has lived in urban and rural Australian communities, and, in Tonga, as an Australian Volunteer International.
In the mid 1990s, Anne began writing poetry and quickly established her reputation with a quick succession of prizes and publications. She features regularly at Victoria’s premier poetry venues and, occasionally, in other places, when she travels.
Anne currently lives in Ballarat, Victoria, where she works as a writer, educator and funeral director.
Rising Light
When the house was sold, she stayed, renting back
the rooms she’d thought of as hers. When winter
closed in, she gathered twigs, set the fire, pulled
her chair close. She saw the horses arrive, three
welsh ponies; a grey, a bay, and one, the colour
of wheat. Each one brought from somewhere else.
In spring, the ponies shredded the young trees
she’d planted, nibbling on the soft new growth.
They cropped the grass, slurped from the dam.
Their bellies grew round. In the mornings, she
leaned on the fence, the rotten palings digging
into her fleshy underarms, her eyes searching.
One morning, as she stared across the paddocks,
she saw it, the white foal following the grey mare
towards the house-yard. And then two days later,
on a day when fog clung to the valley, a bay foal
teetered beside its mother. The lighter pony
grazed on the slope, its belly bulging. Feeling
the dampness on her skin, she watched all this.
Just herself, and the welsh ponies with their foals
coming towards her, all of them cocooned in the mist,
the young sun struggling. Next year she would be
somewhere else, but this place on this spring morning
would be hers. It would be hers now.
International Women’s Day
Women’s voices drift above the palms
across the edge of night, colouringthe Tongan morning with holy songs
a benediction for the waking world.Filtering through western latitudes
into coffee shops brimming with chatter,the day passes in the telling of stories,
the night throbs with the dancingand stomping of women till the darkness
is full of the sound of breaking glass.The women who first blessed the day
sit in the glow of the new morninggouging at coconuts, the white flesh
falling into a pile of soft wafers.
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| Options | ePub, mobi(kindle), PB, pdf |
In her third collection from Interactive Press, E. A. Gleeson casts her poetic eye as far afield as Belfast or as close to home as her own mortality.
In an assured but always personal voice, she addresses the everyday, the exotic and even the taboo with immersive detail, challenging the reader to reflect on the elemental issues of modern existence.
This impressive first poetry collection traverses time and place with ease. Acute in her ability to juxtapose cultures in a breath, Gleeson is as much at ease adopting a perspective on Tongan women as on the wife of the Desert Fox, Irwin Rommel. In Between the Dancing was the winner of the 2008 IP Picks Best First Book Award.”
Heather Taylor Johnson’s poetry captures the immediacy of a crisp Rocky Mountains landscape and the moments of intimacy we wish we could freeze-frame.
This is a celebration of clean air, snow and sunflowers, and a home divided between two continents, but it’s mostly about the vibrancy and transforming power of love.
Japanese people cherish the tanka form as much now as they did in ancient times. And for English-speaking people, this anthology will provide an excellent way of experiencing tanka as English poetry.
“These are poems that go beyond the limits of words. By wrestling with the poems in 3rd i, by engaging with them, the world is more intensely lived. This guy is offering us everything. This is heroic poetry.” — John Marsden
Jest the Funny Bits is a collection of Bill’s comic poems, plays and short stories. He had a lot of fun writing them and he really hopes you have fun reading them. However, spoiler alert, they’re not for everyone. If you’re a humourless sour grumpy-pants, whose face would split in two if you attempted to smile or laugh, then, whatever you do, don’t read this book!
In Oh My Rapture, Gemma White draws on her own lived experiences with bipolar, and her attempts to transcend it through the power of her imagination and the creation of art. Entwined throughout the poems in this collection are allusions to themes in The Red Hand Files, as every poem is a direct response to a different file.
That old childhood saying ‘pick what you want from the tree of life’ simply not working anymore? Becoming a foreigner in Indonesia might be as good a stab at something new and rewarding, as anything…
If you are the only one capable of saving the world, would a hedgehog be your go-to solution? Should you commit seppuku simply because you feel at home everywhere? How much trouble could you be in, if you imagine that most people you meet are your concubines? What if you find out that God occasionally indulges in writing dirty poems? These questions seem absurd. However, before passing judgment, you might discover the surprising poetic resolutions that Daniel Ionita proposes in this volume.
More Lies is a highly referential comedy thriller about a writer being held hostage in their own apartment and forced to type to hide the manoeuvres of a femme fatale, holding a pearl handled gun, and her brother, a small-time thug with big time ambitions.
The Fickle Pendulum assays belief and doubt through three historical figures – St. Thomas the Apostle, Galileo Galilei and Laura (Riding) Jackson – and uses them to pivot into wider thematic worlds The writing is thoughtful, exploratory and never weighed down by its subject matter, and the language vibrant and rich in metaphor.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
“E. A. Gleeson has done it again, with poems delivering to the reader intense moments of love, curious whimsy, small surprises that go deep (like a son bringing her a poem he wrote, and a strange tale of lost dogs after a storm). If ekphrasis truly means ‘a lucid, self-contained description’, then every poem in this book qualifies as a virtuoso display of that formidable and endearing skill.”
– Kevin Brophy
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
“E.A. Gleeson’s eye for revelatory detail, her ability to come
up with phrases that turn observation into exploration and
description into revelation – these are the qualities in her
poems which leave us recommitted to the world and to the
wonder of language.”
– Ross Gillett