It feels to me like I spent the first four months of this year reading the 150 nonfiction entries in the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, writing The Little Green Grammar Book (UNSW Press, September 2008), and turning The Little Red Writing Book intoWriting Well for its US career (Cambridge University Press, August 2008). But apparently I was also working away at some poems and essays, for quite a few pieces have found (or are about to find) their way into the world.

• Four of my recent poems (“And You”, “Two Hens”, “Urban Eclogues” and “Plenty”) appeared in the fourth issue of the very stylish e-zine, Mascara (http://www.mascarapoetry.com/)
• My poem “Hell” appeared in the anthology Poetry Without Borders, a chapbook published by Picaro Press in May 2008.
• My poem “Annandale Nocturne” appeared in Snorkel 7 (snorkel.org.au/007).
• Kunapipi (vol xxix, no 2) included four poems (“Angles of Repose”, “I am My Beloved and my Beloved is Mine”, “The Right Life”, and “This Morning”) and some passages from The Blue Plateau, worked into a lyric essay I called “Days in the Plateau”.
• My Newcastle Prize poem, “Eclogues”, comes out any moment in volume 20, number 1 of the US literary journal Manoa, an issue titled “The Gates of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination” (manoajournal.hawaii.edu).
• My essay “A Faster Kind of Sandstone”, abstracted from The Blue Plateau, appears in Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing (isotope.usu.edu) in June. I’m especially delighted with this essay. Isotope is a fine US journal, and my work appears with some lovely paintings made by my friend, the Blue Mountains artist Philippa Johnson.
• I pieced together a second essay from The Blue Plateau for the journal World Literature Today, published by the University of Oklahoma (http://www.ou.edu/worldlit). This essay is made of weather pieces, in particular the fire pieces, from my memoir; I called the essay “Nursery of Fire”. It comes out in the special green issue of WLT in July (82:4). It appears with some paintings by another great Blue Mountains artist, Roland Hemmert.
• An essay I wrote from a paper I gave to the In the First Person conference at the National Library of Australia in May—“Landscape Memoir: A Portrait of the Writer as Half a Dozen Places”—will appear in Meanjin (http://www.meanjin.unimelb.edu.au) in either September or December 2008.
• Meanjin has also accepted two poems, “The Economics of Spring” and “Improvisations on a Daylight Moon”, to appear later this year.