Sydney, Wednesday 20 November 2024: Renowned and aspiring writers, Humanities academics, Ramsay Scholars and poetry lovers gathered at the State Library of NSW last week to celebrate the poetry of award-winning poets Russ Erwin and Ross Donlon as part of our Ramsay Writers Series.

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.

Russ Erwin is a farmer from the Banniser district in NSW, who is engaged in developing a derelict property along environmentally sustainable principles. His writing is based around his family, his farming life and reflections on the “thousand natural shocks” we share.

Russ has produced four collections and is preparing his fifth, Within Reach, for launch in 2025. He was awarded the Dorothy Porter Prize in 2015 and his 2017 work, Maps of Small Countries was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year. His work has been included in a number of anthologies, e.g. Best Australian Poems in 2004, 2013, 2015, 2017, and Australian Love Poems and he has also been published in Quadrant magazine via Les Murray.

Speaking of past influences, Russ told the audience that his poetic interest was first ignited by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins; he was intrigued by his observation of seemingly slight incidents, and the way his sensualism found expression from an aesthetic disposition. He was also intrigued by Hopkins’ poems written about his mother, which he felt ‘gave him permission’ to write about his mother, too. Russ then delighted the audience with readings of a selection of his poems including In London, Travelling Companion, Skydiver Above Camden and a poem dedicated to his English teacher, Full Circle.

Ross Donlon is the winner of two international poetry prizes and the Launceston Poetry Cup, which is the premier spoken word event of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. He was also awarded the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship in 2010. He has five books of poems published, including Sjovegen (The Sea Road), 2015, translated into Norwegian, The Bread Horse (2021) and For the Record (2021). He is co-author with Tric O’Heare of Kickstarting Poetry Books 1 & 2 (Blake Education, 2007). A sequence about his father, The Blue Dressing Gown, was made for Radio National’s ‘Poetica’ in 2013.

Ross is represented in numerous anthologies both in Australia and the UK and has read his work at festivals in Ireland, England and Scotland, as well as readings in Norway, Poland and Romania. He is the convenor of Poetry from Agitation Hill (held in Castlemaine) and is publisher of Mark Time Books.

Ross said some of the primary influences on his poetry were nursery rhymes with their ‘nonsense verses’ and hearing the calling of horse races as a child. He said he was also indebted to an English teacher who exposed him and his fellow students to countless Shakespeare plays, and then later to inspiration he drew from the Romantic poets, Shelley and Keats. Ross further added that many of his poems had been influenced by a man he had never met, his father. His father, an American serviceman, met his mother in Australia and returned to America, only to die shortly after. His imaginings of his father became the subject of many of his poems.

Ross then read a selection of his own poems including Drawing in the Arctic, The Quiet American, Bio (a humorous poem about himself) and Eating Chips with Jane Austen.    

Ramsay Centre Academic Director Professor Diana Glenn closed the evening thanking the 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 also gave particular thanks to regular special guest poet Luke Whitington 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