Peter
Minter is a writer, editor and publisher living in Sydney, where he lectures in
Australian Indigenous Studies at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. He has
published two books of poems, Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin (Five Islands Press
1995), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Poetry
Prize, and Empty Texas (Paper Bark Press 1999) which won the 2000 Age
Poetry Book of the Year. His work has appeared in numerous
Australian and international paper and electronic journals including Jacket,
Stand, Heat, Slope, Salt, Southerly, The
Prague Review, Verse and PLASTIC, and in the special Australian
editions of Poetry Review, Verse and The Atlanta Review.
He is presently poetry editor for Meanjin, a contributing editor to Boxkite,
and co-edited Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (Paper Bark Press 2000). He was awarded the
2000 Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship for Poetry, with which he represented
Australia at the 2000 Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetics.
Publications
Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin Five Island Press 1995
Empty Texas Paper Bark Press 1999
Morning, Hyphen (pamphlet) Vagabond
Press 2000
Anthologies
Landbridge: Contemporary Australian
Poetry Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1999
(ed.
John Kinsella)
Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian
Poets Paper Bark Press 2000
(eds.
Michael Brennan & Peter Minter)
New Music: Contemporary Poetry Five Islands Press
(ed.
John Leonard) forthcoming August 2001
Poetry
Morning,
Hyphen
For staying is
nowhere.
Rilke
From beginning
& bent to break syntax,
your beautiful rush
Against surface,
necessities of life
and a dream, again
Detailed as wanting
complete exposure, nightly
excoriation
Of feeling
suspended then above
this rush:
Names, we forget them,
ghost fingers lost between
hyphenated vertebrae.
To collect sky to trace out
repetition. Wet sand condenses over
evaporate surface. You said your lips
contact repeats contact. Those black
crows rising over the city as you think to walk into leaving. At the centre a solution of crystal polished
below earth, light emergent at regular intervals. Red transposes the bending of spirals, already bleeding from the
chin. A series of foaming, the division
of foaming. I feel the border of your
body arrested in mine. I repeat the
border of your body arrested.
In the combination
each other
limits of misunderstanding
A sparrow falls
above acres of grain,
uncommon satire
In combination
of figure or ground, breeze
uprooting the Herald
Cool shore’s
invisible salt, information
saltbeaten and relaxed.
In morning I wake to enclosure, half a home, arresting
half. Water leaks sound less ear, other
repetition. This morning caverns of ocean
break into light, fresh green stars’ crescent blue home appraises the courage
of our moving. Here. Then overflow, the memory of overflowing. An eagle by the cliff edge assumes the
character of ‘missing’, intersects waves or recollects flesh. Fish.
At this edge. At this edge we
confide what traces of needing redefine doubt.
The breeze our coagulate excess.
Not knowing why
detail evaporates extremities,
wood gone
And ducks hollow
image and reference to place,
berries propositionally
Or else just regular terrain
your things
unify discretely.
Not a leaf stirs
doubt, your otherworldly air
of kind regards
Thickening in places,
dogs
hollering in trees.
Light’s trick illuminates a tolerance for figures. Said
again, apprehension figures constitution, then the red tulip then the
shell. Meteors relive an axis of
self, enters refusals, data
ascertainable as grief. Your face
drowns a commitment to history, my blind triage of skins. The whale skin exposed. My whale skin seeps out black sand &
redevelops belief, decay in the guise of miracles fallen. Good loving leaks day’s leak, the
days’ proliferate absence or silent then the moon and its
halo.
Or to this
passing by, the deliverance
and hands’ brief
Conference, all
indivision as cool blood
light along
Your index finger,
substrate
massaged to bone.
I recollect an incision
of neon, illicit
refraction &
Each floor lost up
to luminous cloud.
Between us
Lost again
in the gifted lip’s
fresh take
A corresponding
zero in the heart,
eating air.
Prior to metonymy’s presence,
love, zeros degree texture & duration affect & materiality, your
planet’s constitutive hand written on skins. Sand ampersand’s & s&
ambersand’s melting exclamatory poecosis the model is … patterns of ecology,
environmentalism, bio-realism, the complex modelings of the non-linear sciences
… What better thing for poets to do right now than to begin in one language and
end up in others & flesh, unfolds planes of composition, covered and
uncovered waves disenclosure & memory. To repeat, your notes toward a
linguistic musicology: punctuation dreams mathematic’s tonal condensations, the
material’s sound environment arriving as amplitude & ellipistemic feedback. Thus ecologies of graphemes, texture. Whale
songs. Decomposition.
North easterly
cloudy,
heat’s demand
Abut against grey
hill end
& vanishing;
We continue to
be here,
startling the light
As corresponding
attitudes
touch, clearer
Now for growth,
our enzymes’
gravitas.
Then traces of you around, in
my body. Even the lightest touch my own
hand my face, resting my chin, touching my lips. Is your hand. Is left.
The weight, curiosity & intention your gestures toward mine playces
contact remain now as your body leaked into my skin. Is still meeting, gentle
& determined. Absence’s electrovalency & ions shared But now we have
come to be in our own way which is a completely different way &
moment’s flash-back as tongues. The
memory scent of saliva. The unswerving threshold of speech. There is no consolation. There is not.
What revelation;
the
small bird’s voice
deteriorates
Closure
evaporate as bright
sound,
Permian
cacti steaming under
terracotta sky.
What revelation;
a small white horse
interior
Death
& reappearance,
the constituent
Phase analogous
or not
collusion of instinct.
In poeming a world it gets
to appear. The lie of
utopia’s text its measure of ending.
What recognitions and where, where we appear, how it does one thing or
another availability as kinetic witness.
Or there is no place broken over distance. Where is the house of light, of wood, the million
conversations. To go. Percepts escalate
as shadow, you said, & gravity’s weight of experience folds the
small of my back into small. To small
it, tail bone, back, repetitive, our determined walk toward light from distance
in corridors. What tenderness, where
your face does drift into loving partly.
Cash flow
asleep, stars revert
to investments
Or power,
fusion erupting again
as clouds break
Drafts
above the crest. Light
worship,
Fuzzy logic
at this time of day
you define
Acres of redundancy,
alterior rains
alluring sovereignty
& Proliferate
mother, anti
thetical
As trees go
under, your White Stones’
roseate shoots.
Or asking. Joy to enter. Fifth Avenue coils simultaneity, the city appearing if wanted. To
light. Long breath holding &
rippling gifts over. Then over. So this
curiosity, eros, what gentle power unfolding recognition as each cell’s lean
toward contact, exchange. Then, walking
to night, your eyes texture new song and hip’s rub, & pelvic, teeth, soft
cleaving into us growing brightly as movement, relation, light liberation and
sex. Cogent muscle, fucking, situation
situate as care for each day’s care & body, the fact of this. These spaces
our body makes wordlessly and breathtaken. All day the window. In pain, intending not to leave so. Just, sideways. Then. Coinspired.
The condition
security
and hyacinth
What flowers
dark
observatory
Or wishes’
cool berth flying
over cities:
Your folding
the lake up,
sweet calves’
Radical gullibility
shredding
distance, unconditional
Attention &
facing it, eye’s
matter
Nova nor not,
accumulating us
then.
With skin, sky, generous what
branches, determined. To walk in,
again, to bind wide sound & wave.
Waves rush for sand, expressed so.
Unclothed, away, this message is coherent, strophic genius & tongues
twinning below sense. To embrace the porous creatures as if for the first
time, & wanting to say simple things, like, your sweater. Remember the
texture of. What life is this? At a
core you wait as you, absolute. & from space bleeds, mistaking
outline. Permanence encounters permanence, all apparitional
halves.
For moments
rearrange grief, your
other hand’s
Symmetry &
full breath, salt
water
Breach red sleeves
causeway and trust.
Our hands
Turn
stomach wise, Agility
shocked once
And here, again
truth
unsimplified
Care immaterial,
encountered, or
complete.
Of what gendered consequence the
horizon, everywhere then window, interval, window. The equal figure,
differential attention or spontaneity. Our continuous action and besides,
walking forward attention and arms breadth.
Then eyes, again. Calling into
each day clarity, condensation. What
has departed in brief, again. The mind
falls through a reversible body, never mind small things are particular in the
city, the red star.
As closure
erupts over leaving,
erasure
And lights go
seasonal, I address
revisioning
Letters, stem cells
weeping
as silence.
Your scars’
temporality bleeds
constellations,
The whole point
exceeding
directory’s mobility.
So to walk about time, drift as Narcissus
Lillies. Then Calendula, the quiet retrieval of healing. An arrangement of dark avenues, unique
listening or confluence as pressure. Of instinct, sandstone scripted by
pressure and unwanted detail. Then, wanting to be here, cruise missiles film
correspondences, the best in America, our regular slippage of channels and
embankments of trust. Then, silent in boxes, our relation hovers above
singularity. Acres of abdomens vaporise
silver. Your real skin addresses the
vacuum of progress. Vista dazzling and
loved.
Casual strangers
stop this body, senses
changed
Enough to welcome snow,
an American memory’s
feverish proposition.
Rosemary drifts
into profile, telephonic
subtractions
Radiate a cone of attention
& end here,
the arrival of sense
Forgiven to feel
convolvulate
extraction and poise
Shadows’ threshold,
the whole body
on offer,
Where to give
it, where the giving
again’ will.
Memory, my thermal rejoinder. A colourless
litmus & red shift overcome revision and simmering ice. In the geography of
another city filaments of heat dissolve individuality, our haze a revision of
substance. As air makes way for illusions of depth an ash spark, waiting
for impact, loses contingency & socialises art. What the fuck, and who?
Or what expedient lining of durability the future abducts, the present ablaze,
the light song floating as darkness. You
say the interval has it, the nervous system, the tree.
Calibrated
gestures get syntax
appears
s set off
optimistic & unsent
corporis fabrica
Audio surface impress
ions come in
hot butterfly & euca
lypt ears &
eyes drive little kisses
Zuk, much ado
The blueprints’
immediat
e alphabet.
Complex iteration, sight, memories index
& soft point fire’s regard.
Carnelian. Each afternoon my
arteries precedence in cloud. What
branches mortality’s arrest — earth, ocean, spray & the shadow our body
makes out, on sand. This debris we
wake, these eruptions of consistency are totally groundless. Flicker as
constitution, so utterly grounded, as you say, a praxis of spatiality
recohering as accuracy. Or the mirror of stars, your belly’s relation to myth
& symbolic touch as coffee traced over hands. I am redistributed, thus: what I do not know yet, but sense.
Luminous, real, recognised in. Leaning. Then astonished by blue, its careful
organisation each moment’s testing.
The locus of
which is as often
I am, nor affect
For it &
deforested as mega
memory
Heart extremely
visible maps
passing for human
Experiences’
measure of objectivity
nutshell dharmas
If one thinks
desire originates
nonetheless.
Against the weight. Wind chime & structure incised by
darkness. & the weight, remarkable
this cognisance, assured retribution & law, redrift apparent and
frail. Look to embarkation. Your swallowing bone & bud on the
running as saliva transposes film, spine following pleasure and the rupture of
joy around an axis, encompassing a single point free of the most precise
dance of things, a point of anticipation, and isn’t it in that point, obliged
to reiterate by its presence the wholeness of its surroundings, that all
connections come together? Sing
thinking, the voice heard for the origin of distance and space.
Again the weight, again the repeat the condition we rake, shift and walk
from.
The body
sees gestures,
the bodies
Blue wren
just
touching above
Desire
the green fissure
of seeing
Appetite, calm
the reconnaissance
of light
And first wing’s
apprehension,
cool air
& memory’s
earth sweet
recompense.
So, at wind edge, at rain. Tranquility & fascination apprehend
closure, marginal diffraction grey. At the end of it your voice diffracts
conscient melody as wonder, silence at a paddock’s far reach &
beautiful. What is that desire, again,
contact, gentle curiosity or grasses wild spread.
Whatever; breath’s light intent. It just does, undoes.