Cirrus@Austlit

'It’s a great pleasure and honour to be here with you this evening, in celebration of the publication of Mark O’Flynn’s seventh poetry collection, Undercoat: Poems about Paintings. This is actually the third time I’ve had the pleasure of launching one of Mark’s books. Mark and I have known each other now for many years, after first meeting during the heyday of the (very tongue-in-cheekly) so-called ‘Katoomba Bloomsbury Set’ that gathered around the Varuna Writers’ Centre (as it was then known) back in the mid 1990s. It was at Varuna in June of 1996 that I launched Mark’s first book of poetry The too bright sun as part of the launch of the fourth Five Islands Press New Poets Series.' (Introduction)

'Since the year 2000 with the publication of Why I am not a Farmer Brendan Ryan has been ploughing his own fertile patch of the poetic landscape. Feldspar, his seventh collection, (aside from the evocatively titled memoir Walk Like a Cow) treads familiar terrain. Any why not? Dorothy Hewett consistently returned to the West Australian wheat fields of her youth. So too, Ryan returns to the remembered territory of his past.' (Introduction)

'In trying to pin down the inspiration for where a poem might come from, the late Dorothy Porter (to whom this book is dedicated) once related the story that one of her students, a murderer in Long Bay gaol, suggested that a novel could be told in haiku. This lead her, apparently, to the germ of an idea – a crime novel told in verse, which became The Monkey’s Mask. Aesthetic ideas can come from the most unlikely sources, even Long Bay gaol. Anne Carson has used this notion as the catalyst for an exploration into famous fictional detectives told in verse, or more specifically, prose poetry.'(Introduction)