“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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17 February 2009

POOR BOY COMMITS POETRY















The tussocks



Well into the tussocks I interrupted ducks

One flightless teenager galloped across the water

And then an explosion of babies

And a mother who did the broken wing trick about a chain away

While I tipped an old cassoulet out for the fish


The rain dug itself in this afternoon

My smoker smouldering some McCubbin into a shin of beef

While ibis rose from the bottom vineyard

To perch on trellis posts in prehistoric rows

And Peter fed his horses as if everything was normal



Philip White




The painting - VIOLET AND GOLD (1911) - is by Fred McCubbin, 1855-1917. One of the artist's Mount Macedon works, it is a recent acquisition of the collection of the National Gallery Of Australia. The poem was written back in the winter, when it felt like a lot of things were about to go wrong in the cosmos.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You really are a silly old usless drunkard decrepid waste f space posing as a poet, which you are not...you are non of the things you claim to be you silly imposter.
Monnie was right to leave you, you are a waste of O2, eeking out a poitless and really quite meaningless existance in the near gutters of Adelaide.
Its so sad what you ended up being.

http://www.nt.gov.au/lant/pub/Index%207th%20Assembly%20Minutes.pdf