Cirrus@Austlit

'nguluman ... If the river ever gets going, it's only running a little, and the whole thing is never deep enough to fill the wetland and then trickle into the waterhole. They call that one Poisoned Waterholes Creek.' - Tara June Winch, The Yield.

'FourW thirty-one was made possible by a community arts grant from Riverina Water - brokered by our clever Claire Baker - so, as many of you know, the contents has a (non-exclusive) preoccupation with water in some sense - literally or metaphorically. Water can be a source, an end (life & death), a medium, indicative of intense or attenuated pain, pleasure, leakage, (ful)filment ... Geographically, cosmically, emotionally, politically, mathematically, botanically (I could go on ...) water metaphorises the depths, currents, fluidity, typhoons and tsunamis of the human condition. Certainly this has provided a stimulating prompt for writing workshops and both poetic and prosaic experimentation ... The teacher in me wants to invite readers to see how many water motifs, images, references (direct and implied) they can find in the contents. We thank Riverina Water for its commitment to and support for the creative well-being of our regional (writing) communities.' (David Gilbey, Editorial introduction)

'These are contradictory times and Charles Dickens' haunting words at the opening of A Tale of Two Cities hold prophetically true as a gloss of the contents of four W twenty-nine-. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age. foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was  the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...' One of the roles of poetry and fiction is to explore and articulate contradiction and contrariety in all its imagined layers, finials, matrices and interstice,. It's what gives art part of its power, 'authenticity', seductive appeal — to take readers inside new ways of seeing the familiar world: 'language made strange' is still a useful definition of poetry (and prose).' (Editorial introduction)
 

This issue contains more than 50 poems and nearly 20 short stories by local, national, and international writers.