Cirrus@Austlit

'When Live Encounters editor, Mark Ulyseas, invited me to reach out to thirty poets for their contributions to a special Australian Edition of the journal, I knew I had my work cut out. Live Encounters has long been recognised and appreciated for taking a spirit-level to the joists and beams of poetry journal publication by featuring new and emerging voices next to the work of poets with international reputations.' (Audrey Molloy, Editorial introduction)

'I always dreamed of being a writer. In the solid, stable, predictable provincial town where I grew up, it felt as if I was always waiting for something to happen. There was a wide river that moved slowly through the centre of my world, yellow-green parks lining the banks where banyan trees grew side by side with gums, the broad streets with deep verandahed shade. The town was fringed by cane fields and forestry plantations. Daydreaming and writing poetry, I found, were ways to not only navigate daily life, but to reimagine it more boldly. I wrote poetry in A3 scrapbooks, illustrating the opposite page with drawings in coloured pencil. A dreamy pastel light of possibility shone through the west-facing windows in the afternoon as I sat cross-legged for hours at the coffee table on the yellow shag-pile carpet. Some of the poems from those years are quite fantastical.' (Jane Frank, Editorial introduction)

'When the indomitable Mark Ulyseas invited me to pen this editorial, I was honoured of course, but also uncharacteristically flummoxed.

'All around me the world was coming off the rails. My studio was flooded after once-in-a-century rains that were a repeat of last year and the year before. There were not one, not two, but three great big elephants in the room that I felt obliged to gloss over if I ever I had a hope of keeping within the word limit. I’m chatty, people. To point them all out, one by one, would glaze too many otherwise bright eyes, so I will defer to Reuters. As someone recently observed in a Sydney editorial, we in the West have grown somewhat inured of big H history in our thirty years of gaudy triumphalism, the Fukuyama conviction that there would be no more vast pestilences, no more vast wars. Well those days are gone, it would seem, heralded in from an Antipodean perspective when most of the east coast of my country caught fire. There has been almost no good news since. Thus, my quandary. Art, afterall, thrives on the conviction that life will prevail.' (Justin Lowe, An Emporium of Letters, Editorial introduction)