Dymocks Adelaide has expanded its poetry range.

On Adelaide Poetry Gig Guide Daniel Watson has just let us know that the Rundle Street store now has new classic anthologies; new ranges on love, loss, war & haiku, local and Australian poets including Geoff Goodfellow’s,‘Waltzing With Jack Dancer’ ,Wet Ink, Luke Davies’ ‘Interferon Psalms’, Kerryn Tredrea’s ‘Adventures in Captivity’ (now in its 2nd ed.), reprints of Sean King’s ‘Empire of the Mind.’

Plus a new Picaro Press shipment including:

Aidan Coleman, Rob Walker, Yahia Al-Samawy, Juliet A. Paine, Graham Catt, Juan Garrido Salgado, David Malouf, Dorothy Porter Tom Shapcott & Adam Aitken.

Adelaide doesn’t have the luxury of Melbourne’s Collected Works (Australia’s biggest – and possibly only – dedicated poetry bookshop) but we are well served by the new Dymocks range as well as Dark Horsey at Lion Arts, Imprints in Hindley Street and Adelaide Booksellers for second-hand and out-of-print.

My poem crying at the poetry reading is up on Red River Review.

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See it HERE.

I was in Sa Pa (mountains of northern Vietnam) two days ago when I had  emails from Maggie Emmett of Friendly Street & Julie Walker of RiAus to say that my poem Moths and butterflies had been chosen as a finalist in the RiAus Science Poetry Competition and featured as FS Poem of the Month for November.

Strangely, the day before we’d been on a hike to the Black Hmong village of Cat Cat where we’d seen  multitudes of unfamiliar butterflies…

The poem first appeared in my collection micromacro in 2006.

Moths and Butterflies

moths

go about their work

stoically in grey suits

or grimy blue overalls

pollinating flowers

feed birds and frogs

need fur coats for warmth

working the graveyard shift

Butterflies are showy socialites

sipping nectar at

A-list cocktail parties

All show, no substance,

superficial in their beauty

mwah-mwahing insincere air kisses

to the Beautiful Pupae.

Moths are the working class

waiting for the revolution.

© Rob Walker 2006

My review of David Barnes’ beautiful collection Prayers waiting for God appears on The Compulsive Reader website. Thanks to Maggie Ball for publishing it.

“The blurb on the back says it all: “This is David Barnes’ first and last book.” That David ever came to be a poet is a kind of miracle in itself. He’s an unlikely candidate. A ward of the state, placed in institutions and physically and sexually abused – there was little likelihood that he would become a functioning adult, let alone a loving one who could have a happy relationship, a much-loved son, a self-deprecating sense of humour – or a writing career.
I first ‘met’ David in the early days of the internet when he ran an early e-lit journal called Poetry DownUnder from 1997. David published a lot of my early work which encouraged me to write more and send it to other places as well…” MORE HERE.

Earth’sGreatestHits by robwalkerpoet

(for the full story behind this recording, see my previous entry EARTHLY MATTERS.