T H R I L L E D to see Kevin Smith, a terrific lyric poet and a student of mine, take out this year’s Newcastle Poetry Prize with his deeply felt poem “The Crossing.” It’s a tender and a well crafted lyric poem I was equally delighted to see my poem take second place. “Lines for Late Winter,” written on the day we interred my mother’s ashes, begins as a riff on Mark Strand’s “Lines for Winter” and continues, thinking of the shores I found myself stumbling along in my ageing body, that day late in winter, Strand’s notes of stubborn gladness and determination to carry on and do some good even in the face of impossible odds. Halfway in a reef heron turned up to help me finish the poem, and there is no way that was not my mother. Another student of mine, the wonderful Jo Gardiner, took out third prize for her “A Country Childhood”.

F I O R E Chamber, a brilliant young vocal ensemble from Melbourne premiered at a concert in Camberwell on Sunday (19 November) three of the secular carols (and my “Advent/ure”) composed by Alan Holley from my “Nine Carols”. Along with the audience in St Johns and many others online, I was hearing for the first time my words sung in Alan’s playful and complex, lyrical compositions. And I was astonished.

The shortlist for Australia’s foremost poetry prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, was announced today (10 October 2023). Thanks to Judith Nangala Crispin and John Foulcher for their work and discernment as judges this year. Congratulations to Jo Gardiner and Kevin Smith and others for making this strong list. Two poems of mine, “Fall” and “Lines for Late Winter; or, the Reef Heron”, have made the shortlist, too.

I talk with poet Bronwyn Lea about beauty, craft, longing, scholarship, delight, and the art of eternal beginning, by way of launching my latest, A Beginner’s Guide, north of the border. Wednesday 23 August, 6 for 6:30 at Echo & Bounce, 596 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba, Brisbane/ Meanjin.

On Saturday evening, 19 August, I’m reading at a Red Room Poetry gig, part of the South Coast Writers Festival, in Wollongong. All of us reading feature in an anthology of poems written Red Room, to be published later this year.

So farewell, Cormac McCarthy. Your writing was a habitable wilderness for me and many. Your sentences taught me poetry and the mathematics of grace. Thank you for being among us in your life and in your works. Thank you for your serious heart and the wild and tender music of your mind and how you spoke it.

Bpangerang woman, artist and sublime poet, Judith Nangala Crispin, and award-winning poet and performance artist Paris Rosemont join Russell and me at a performance of poems and songs, for The Blue Square Art Prize at the BDAS Gallery, Short Street, Bowral, Saturday 27 May 2023, 6 till 9pm.

Again this year, I’ll be doing a show with my brother Russell and his band as part of the Blue Square Art Festival in Bowral. Russ has set many of the poems from my three most recent books (A Gathered Distance, Walking Underwater, and A Beginner’s Guide); he’ll perform two sets of those on the night, and I’ll read three or four new poems. Saturday 27 May at 6:00pm. Bowral District Art Society Gallery, 1 Short Street, Bowral.

Two carols on the theme of dying and how to survive it: “The Carol of the Dead,” and “The Carol of the Living.” I read them today in honour of my mother, who died in April, and Robert Adamson, who died on Friday .

O N S U N D A Y, 11 December 2022, the Australian Chamber Choir gives the world premiere performance of “The Carol of the Two Crows,” a setting by Alan Holley of one of nine new carols I’ve written for him and them.

The art of beginning is the art of dying, and each of us needs to find their way there urgently, and the world in general needs this kind of radical reboot. Photographs and poems may seem flimsy vessels for carrying us to this necessary afterlife in life. But so it always was. It has always fallen to art to run urgent lyric repairs on reality, to restore some of us at least to the sanity upon which all justice and the preservation of the earth depends. Come hear Judith Nangala Crispin and me talk about all this in our artistic practice—at the launch of the new hardbound edition of A Beginner’s Guide at the Hotel Nishi, in Canberra on the evening of Monday 5 December 2022.

Of the six poems I had shortlisted for the Australian Catholic University Poetry prize this year (2022), whose theme was Hope, I held out least hope for “Cubist Landscape.” But it came third this year, and I see now how it enacts the hope that poetry performs—the movement from the abstract to the actual, from the inchoate to the embodied. Touching, too, to share the medals with my mentee, graduate of my online poetry masterclass What the Light Tells, Kevin Smith.

From 7pm on Saturday 28 May 2022, Russell Tredinnick will perform songs composed from poems in my new collection A Beginner’s Guide at an event of the same name at the Bowral Art Gallery. An evening of poetry and songs. I’ll read alongside the wonderful Greek-Australian poet Dimitra Harvey. The event raises money for CanAssist and is one of a number of events that form this year’s Blue Square Art Prize. Book now.

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE is my fifth poetry collection. It’s a book of mornings—not so much morning as a subject, but dawning, beginning. As a way. Of life and of art and of governance. I’m honoured to have the book launched, on the eve of the election, by Stephen Jones MP, the local member (Labor) at Ngununggula, the regional art gallery, 3:30 for 4pm Friday 13 May. Join us.