Judith Bishop

Biographical note:  Judith Bishop was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1972. Her poems have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in Poetry (2002-2004), an Academy of American Poets University Prize (2004), and the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize (2006), and they appear in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (ed. Judith Beveridge) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (ed. Dorothy Porter). She works as a Linguist/Project Manager with a speech technology company in Sydney.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712830
ISBN:  9781844712830
Author:  Judith Bishop
Title:  Event
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-07
Extent:  84pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Event, the first book by Australian poet Judith Bishop, is the work of a border-crosser. Emotionally intense, formally inventive and musical, with influences ranging from Ted Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop to Yves Bonnefoy, these poems have won prestigious awards in Australia and the U.S. and feature in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (U.Q.P) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (Black Inc.).. Local and global at once, with a strong naturalist bent, they gather in birds, flora and fauna from across four continents, Australia, North and South America and Europe. Central to the collection is a striking sequence poem which inhabits the voice of the Aztec translator in the Spanish Conquest, La Malinche. Indeed, the human voice — a form of breath, but “irreversible” in what it says and does — performs the principal role in this book’s erotic theatre of love and betrayal. Event is, above all, a book of intimate dialogues between a human self and her others: lovers, animals, elements of the natural world, and deities, some distant, some destroyed. Wind, too, has a leading part, taking on the dual role of a natural force and of something close to fate. Rising as if out of nowhere in these poems, wind is a metaphor for the pure nature of events which occur without premonition and without recourse.

Table of contents:
Event
After the Elements
I.
Desert Wind
The Master of Ikebana
It Begins Where You Stand
Late in the Day
Passage of Winter Precluded; or, Death Imagined
The Indifferent
II.
Rabbit
Dona Marina: Part I
Rembrandt’s Presentation in the Temple
The Birds Reported from the South —
Vertigo
Definition of a Place
“And the Clouds Cleared the Sky … “
“The Heart, Arrested Muscle … “
Night Fire: A Letter
III.
Interval
IV.
The Vow
The Shatter Rooms
Have Before, Would Again
Il Mostro di Firenze
An Italian Piazza
Savonarolas
Alice Missing in Wonderland
Agitation
Dona Marina: Part II
Threnody
Affair
Two Windows
Apology
V.
Epistles
Sorretto da Quattro Angeli
On Arriving
Still Life with Cockles and Shells
Dona Marina: Part III
Thanatos
How to Speak of Love
Issuance
The Fireworks Maker of Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri
Argument in White
“The Chords of Snow Melting …”

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Excerpt from book:  

The Shatter Rooms

A raindrop, then another: there is
no reply to that. I’ll trust
in some things always,
beyond the shatter rooms.

High bones of the plane tree,
lighter by the hour; leaf,
fallen crosswise on the clover
like a lintel; rain-soaked lilacs …

All my deft surrogates for speech.

* * *

Look, here —
someone’s speaking and yet no-
body speaks —

So Plato damned the written word:
pitched and sibylline and numb, the rattle
of an absent soul, without means to reply — without anchor
in the body of a person
who will die —

* * *

Who is dying to speak her own truths
because of this —

* * *

Say he found the river
cold; say he dipped a foot
into the fray of it,
the glass of it;
say he lay down on the grass —
in his mind’s dress
only, in the guise
of Socrates.

Wind tremors
in the plane tree.
He begins to write.
The wind writes
with his hand.
The tree writes
in his hand.
In a neighbouring house,
a squalling infant
wakes to find
it cannot speak.

Unpublished endorsement :  Here is a remarkable poet, in whom delicacy of language equals fineness of perception. She sings "as if", as though all barriers had vanished between self and the shimmering world. Lightness and modern pastoral pervade her cities, animated by birds, creatures of the spirit.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe