Sydney, Thursday 12 September 2024:Three celebrated, award-winning Australian poets delighted an audience of renowned and aspiring writers, Humanities academics, Ramsay Scholars and poetry lovers at the recent Ramsay Writers event held at the State Library of NSW.
The Ramsay Writers Series showcases Australian writers, treating audiences to readings of their work, as well as their perspectives on influential works from the past. For the third year the series has focussed on Australian poets.
At last week’s event the audience heard from poets Rhyll McMaster, Kerrie Nelson and the series’ regular special guest poet Luke Whitington.
Rhyll McMaster was the first poet to present. She has written six books of poetry which have won numerous awards including the C.J.Dennis Prize and the Grace Leven Prize. She has also staged her poetry in a performance piece with a singer and a four-piece band, and her radio play, On My Empty Feet, was broadcast by the ABC.
Her 2012 poetry book Late Night Shopping was highly commended in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and her 2007 novel Feather Man won the Barbara Jefferis Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Prize at the 2008 NSW Premier’s Awards.
Rhyll spoke of 19th-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins as a major influence on her writing. Considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era, Hopkins was thought to have bipolar disorder, with Rhyll speculating this may have led him to focus in forensic detail on “the blazing essence of things” and rebel against conventional structure in his poems. “Hopkins made me understand the English language is infinitely flexible and deeply resonant and that a poem doesn’t have to rhyme,” she said.
Rhyll read Hopkins’ poem Pied Beauty in which he praises God for the beautiful imperfection of nature. Rhyll also spoke of Pulitzer-prize winning poet Theodore Roethke, who, like Hopkins, was a close observer of nature and suffered depression, leading him in his poem Dolor to paint inanimate objects as images of depression.
From her own work, Rhyll read from her novel Feather Man, as well as the poems, Touch, Birds, Arrogant Animals, Arachnophobia, The Minimal, Chemical Bodies, The Shell, I Love Cold Toast, Married to the Mob and Flying the Coop.
The next poet to present, Kerrie Nelson, is a Canberra poet and former public servant who spent most of her career in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. She came to poetry early in her life and then came back to it much later, winning the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets in 2010.
In 2015 her first pamphlet of printed poems, A Chosen Life appeared with Cait Wait’s paintings in an exhibition and reading at The Residency in Alice Springs. Two full-length publications followed: Inlandia (2018) and Meaty Bones (2023) which received a Canberra Critics Circle Award late last year. Kerry also presented at an earlier Ramsay Writers event in 2023.
At this Ramsay Writers event, Kerrie spoke about her upbringing in country NSW and her maternal grandfather, well known as a district poet who could recite the bush ballads of Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson and others. She recounted two pivotal moments in high school that changed the way she saw the world: attending a local production of Macbeth and reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Kerrie said both classic works still resonated today with Macbeth’s themes holding no matter how the play was reimagined, and Pride and Prejudice prompting her to reflect as a teenager on what she wanted out of life, an examination still relevant for women today, many many years after the book was written.
From her own work she read A Snippet of History, My Father Said, Still My Own Woman, This is a Woman, At the Single Women’s Camp, Why I Keep a Digging Stick Under My Pillow, The Machinery of the 98% (part 2), Water Stories, Water Like Art and Ruby Lipstick.
The evening’s final speaker was Luke Whitington. Luke began his career traversing the landscapes of Italy and Ireland where he was published in Florence by The Sigh Press and the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies, respectively. After spending years supporting artists and writers in Dublin through his multimedia gallery Pleasants Factory, Luke returned to Australia where his works have appreared in Fairfax media and several anthologies. His poems have been put to music and sung by the Florence Opera and the Pacific Opera Company Sydney. His major publications are Only Fig & Prosciutto and What Light Can Do by Ginninderra Press, Adelaide.
Luke spoke of how, like Rhyll, he had read poetry by Theodore Roethke, spurred by another American poet Richard Hugo. He also made mention of legendary US poet Mark Strand who encouraged him and read his work, as well as his own father who despite saying there was no money to be made in poetry, could recite Byron, Shelley, Keats and Oscar Wilde.
Luke said he was not meant to be a novelist, detailing how his attempts at writing a novel ended up buried in a plastic bag on Monte Acuto in Umbria where Dante once hid during his escapades. He said his real trigger to become a poet was falling in love with the writing of British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer Lawrence Durrell, who ispired his love of Greece and ancient Greek culture.
Luke also revealed he has a new upcoming book that is a bilingual compilation of around 95 of his Italian poems. He read some of his poems including, Crimson Uproar, The Swallows over St Peter’s Square, Green Silence, Antipasto Orazio, Bologna and What Light Can Do.
Ramsay Centre Academic Director Professor Diana Glenn closed the evening thanking the three inspiring poets for reading their beautiful poems as well as sharing how falling in love with classic works from the past had influenced their thinking and creative processes. She gave particular thanks to Luke who she said had been a guiding force in the creation of the series.
If you wish to be invited to future Ramsay Writers Events email ramsayevents@ramsaycentre.org
Media contact: Sarah Switzer 0407 816 098/ sarah.switzer@ramsaycentre.org