Poetry Monday: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside My Mother

I know it’s not Monday where I am, but my blog, being on US time, still says it’s monday, so I’m going to take the opportunity to showcase a poetry book that is being published tomorrow.  Some weeks ago I blogged about a poetry session My Mother’s Heart that I attended at the Sydney Writers Festival.  Ali Cobby Eckermann’s new poetry book, from which she read, has now arrived, and at first glance, I’m very excited by it.  The work is rooted in the earth, and rich with legend, many stories, love, fear, loss, lost vernacular, a beautiful, and at times terrible history, healing, and as the title suggests, the nature of the maternal, in all its metaphoric implications.  I’ve only skimmed the surface so far, but I’m looking forward to reading through it slowly and deeply and finding new meaning, and new ways of looking at the world through this work:

“there’s a whole ocean filled with sand
between what was and what will be”

More about Ali Cobby Eckermann and her work can be found in this recent interview at Mascara Review: http://mascarareview.com/ali-cobby-eckermann-in-conversation-with-jaydeep-sarangi/

The book is available, from tomorrow, directly from Giramondo.

Poetry Monday: Australia Poetry Podcast at Regime Books

It’s a public holiday monday and you might just be lucky enough to have a few minutes available to listen to poetry and to poets talking about poetry. Not too long ago, Australian publisher Regime Books started a poetry podcast, in part as an antidote to the loss of ABC’s Poetica earlier this year, and they’re now on their sixth episode, featuring none other than MTC Cronin.  Cronin joins Robbie Coburn and Nathan Hondros from her organic farm (chooks, ducks, foxes and all), and talks about such things as thinking vs emotions, where her poetry comes from, motivation, about the nature of metaphor: “if you go into words--even if you go into a single word--you can probably follow it to another word...if you can find some way to really look at them and really get inside them you can find how things are connected to everything else”, on criticism (and where it fails), the relationship between poetry and law, the roots of words and language, on the joy of reading other people’s work: “I’d like to write certain things but haven’t been able to...”, her new book The Law of Poetry, on the nature of publication “if you put a book out, not many people are going to read it...”, and quite a few other things. She also reads a number of poems from her book: “The Wonderful Lawlessness of God”, “The Law of Wine”, “The Law of the Wound”, and a few others. You can hear the whole thing, which is just over an hour (about the time it took me to make bagels this morning, which was perfect), here:
http://www.regimebooks.com.au/mtc-cronin-on-the-australia-poetry-podcast/