AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 2
Debra Westbury
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Debra Westbury by Joe Bugden, 2004.
CH: Who are your favourite Australian writers and why?
DW: Since I'm a poet, I'll try to limit my list of favourite Australian writers to poets - Ron Pretty - of course! For all that he is and all that he does. Mark O'Flynn - whose next collection of poetry What can be Proved will come out with 'Interactive Press' next year. Harper Collins published his novel Grass Dogs this year - beautifully written and totally arresting. Gina Mercer - I've just launched her collection Handfeeding the Crocodile at 'Ten Days on The Island' in Hobart. All the Tasmanian female poets I know - too numerous to mention.
Lauren Williams - Melbourne poet and songwriter/singer. Susan Hampton - a veteran in the best sense of the word. Robyn Rowlands, Lorraine McGuigan, Jennifer Harrison - all Melbourne poets. Aidan Coleman - of Adelaide - whose first collection Avenues and Runways is possibly the best first collection I've seen. A most committed, passionate and professional writer. His pursuit of excellence is an inspiration. Peter Skrzynecki - another veteran, I admire him for his emotional and intellectual honesty, and social engagement. Judith Beveridge - simply a beautiful poet. Likewise Joanne Burns.
CH: What are you working on at the moment?
DW:The View From Here - New and Selected, to be published by Brandl and Schlesinger in 2008.
CH: What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do?
DW: See 'White Coffin Notes' - (the 'you' is me).
White Coffin Notes
Drifting Motionless in a hot room
it's all you do
somewhere between the life
you know, and the life
that ended -
almost two years since
you sat beside his father
and your lover, a stranger
asking what colour you wanted
for your only
your half-grown
son,
and waiting -
You were expected, anyhow,
to answer this
and also the next thing
and the next
whatever it was,
all things being possible,
after all -
the white hot room,
one mile, then another, becalmed,
deathstruck.
CH: Do you believe in life after death?
DW: Only what nature has shown me - that energy is never lost, only transformed.
CH: Name what is most important to you?
DW: Truth, Beauty, Friendship, ART.
CH: What is your favourite season and why?
DW: See 'Autumn Leaving', one of the first poems I wrote when I started writing again 6 months after Luke died and I moved to Katoomba. Autumn has, in any case, always been my favourite season.
Autumn, leaving
These last weeks, the leaves
have been hanging on, quietly shifting
hues through the spectrum of death:
there's a pillar of amber flame
on the hilltop
and red spinnakers
in the blue-eucalypt sea,
the oaks are all burnished
bronze, their limbs
and twiggy nests
exposed.
Today a furious change of wind rushed
through them all and tore each remaining leaf
stem from stalk.
The next, still, morning, the trees
will be like so many spent fires
standing in mounds of coloured ash,
and we'll rest our eyes, again, on evergreens.
CH: What kind of working environment best suits you?
DW: A cosy corner in a café.
CH: What is your gift to the world?
DW: This is something that someone else might best be qualified to answer after my death, because I can only say what I have intended to give - ART, Friendship, Beauty, TRUTH.
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V Bivalves
When the latest tide retreats
pippies rush to bury themselves;
with a parting small bubble
they mostly disappear.
Only the stranded,
with their one pink muscle,
frantically suck and squirt
in their immaculate shells,
or else succumb to beaks
and the urge to fling themselves apart;
still joined at the hinge
but empty.
VI Pelicans
Last night the sea, by stealth,
uncovered
the struts and wires
of a pelican
crashed against the dunes.
Yesterday she was buried
and will be invisible again;
her blood and breath
steeped long ago in sand.
I wait to see if she is still
moved by the wind,
and a long arrow of her sisters
glides down the beach towards me
a foot above the sand;
at the last moment parting
and tipping their great bodies away
as if I was visible
only to them.
Easter Lilies
Midnight is solemn
and dark
but for the easter lilies
nodding down the gully,
in silhouette amongst the ferns;
the moon,
incandescent, levitates
from behind the horizon.
At midday, a century of heat,
and the white gentle heads are drooping,
burning:
they came soon,
summer fierce and late.
Ibis
They're floating lazily on a swell of warm air
when something changes
in the invisible geography of the sky
and the leader begins to move her wings
in a motion that ripples, bird by bird,
down both the arrow's muscular arms,
until they seem to be covering us
with the blue-beating of their wings.
Acknowledgments to: Surface Tension, (Five Islands Press, 1998), Flying Blind, (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002), Our Houses Are Full Of Smoke, (A&R, 1994). |
About the Poet Debra Westbury
|
Debra Westbury has been a familiar voice in Australian poetry since her work began appearing in Australian literary magazines and in various anthologies throughout the 1970's and 80's. Mouth to Mouth, her first collection, was published in 1990 by Five Islands Press. Since it was added to the HSC syllabus in 1998, Mouth to Mouth has been republished by Hodder Education and Cambridge University Press. Westbury has developed a dual career as a distinguished writer and teacher of writing. Throughout the 1990's until the present she has taught courses in Creative Writing at U.O.W., James Cook University, at the University of Western Sydney, and The College of Fine Arts - University of N.S.W. Poems in all four of Debra's previous collections are represented in her new and selected The View from Here, as well as the new work, reflecting her experiences as observer, participant and traveller through the lives of the people, cultures, times and places through which she has moved in these years, from working class origins in Wollongong amongst the migrant's smokestacks of Port Kembla - through intimate involvement in the many lives from inner Western Sydney, to America, and back again to the Blue Mountains - Westbury's voice has retained its poise, and its quiet understated mastery of language and emotion, while retaining a true gift for arresting imagery. |
[Above] Photo of Debra Westbury by Joe Bugden, 2004.
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Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007) |
