Poetry

Francis Webb Centenary ed Rochford Street Review

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FRANCIS WEBB CENTENARY – 8 FEBRUARY 2025

by

8 February 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Australian poet Francis Webb. Born at Rose Park, Adelaide, Francis went to live with his paternal parents in Sydney in 1931 after the death of mother and the institutionalisation of his father for depression. The young Webb was writing poetry at 7 years old and by 1942 his work was appearing in The Bulletin. His first collection, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), was described by Douglas Stewart as major poetry’ and ‘without parallel’ for a debut poet.

Writing about the Webb Centenary Dr Toby Davidson, a poet himself and a  Webb scholar based at Macquarie University, and editor of the UWAP updated edition of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems, writes:

By 1969, when Webb’s career effectively ended with his Collected Poems, he had profoundly influenced both the postwar and late 60s generations. Les Murray called him ‘the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged’, while Gwen Harwood wrote that Webb was ‘unmatched’ and Judith Wright declared ‘He’s done so much suffering for me and I’ve read him so much and I think that’s what poetry is for’. 

Today, Webb is recognised by a new generation as the first Australian poet to write about mental health and the lives of mental patients when it was utterly taboo, informed by his redemptive, transcendent Catholicism. 

Francis Webb will forever be the ultimate ‘poet’s poet’, but he belongs to all Australians and this milestone is a chance to reflect on his legacy which elevates us all. 

To celebrate the centenary year of Webb’s birth Dr Davidson will be convening a series of publications, podcasts and readings in his honour throughout 2025. Details of these events can be found at https:// uwap.uwa.edu.au/ blogs/marginalia/ centenary-of-major-australian-poet-francis-webb

To mark the actual centenary Rochford Street Review is republishing Robert Adamson’s important essay Something Absolutely Splendid as well as the poem ‘Two Canticles’, a poem about Webb by Colleen Keating:

– Mark Roberts

 

 

Mahler’s Third Symphony at Sydney Opera House. First Concert of the Year

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Some of the things on Mahler’s mind  as he  named the scenes

  1. Summer marches in
  2. What the meadow flowers tell us
  3. What the creatures of the forest tell us
  4. What night tells me
  5. What the morning bells say
  6. What love tells us

In 5,  what the bells say, we have the story of St. Peter’s distress and Christ’s forgiveness

 

 

This is Mahler’s longest symphony. Approx 100 mins divvied into six movements.   Simone Young AM was our conductor and it opened the  2025  Sydney Symphony Orchestral year .

 

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Symphony No. 3 in D minor (1896)

 

\relative c' { \set Staff.midiInstrument = #"french horn" \clef treble \key d \minor \numericTimeSignature \time 4/4 \partial 4*1 a4\ff-> | d2-> c4-> d-> | bes2-> f8 r bes4-> | d-> e8-> f-> e4-> d-> | c2-> a4 }

Pan Awakens

 

the clear alpine air,  and rousing 
springfulness  I feel even before
i arrive at the Opera House, so excited
to experience Mahler’s 3rd symphony.

Lights dim, the buzz stills
and from a quaver rest of silence  
eight French Hornsin fortissimo  
wake us from our slumber.

In the beginning was the sound  
it rouses a universe  into being
vibrates the hall with wonder
It stirs like a giant turtle shimming 

after a long sleep,  heavy with its shell 
slow to move as the music sinks 
into the struggles of journey. 
We are there  present on cello strings.

Mahler wanted his symphony 
to be like the world, for it to embrace 
everything; a star map of music
 to comprehend creation  in all 

its magnificence. Its  constellations, 
celestial spheres, ferns and trees, 
flowers, birds and a distant flugelhorn 
off stage a triumphant sound of human life.

Choirs of angels  light up our faces 
and the soloist sings Nietzsche poem  
from Thus spake Zarathustra 
O Soulful one take heed, take heed 

Every desire yearns for eternity  
and with a tender ecstasy of  human  feeling 
on the breath of oboes and clarinets
a slow movement beatifies  the one 

striving to find oneness with nature 
evolving of humanity to divinity .
 Our guest speaker before the concert  
reminded us: let go of thinking 

comprehending, let your eyes gaze over 
allow the music to  burst beyond
the horizons. just be immersed 
not trying to understand. 

No Way back Revolution and Exile, Russia and Beyond. by Nathalie Apouchtine . Book Launch reflection by Colleen Keating

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It is always enjoyable to be part of a launch of a new book . There is always the promise of bringing it forth into the world that it will make its mark, inform someone, change someone, help someone to find their way anew and so it is with the launch of

No Way Back  

Revolution and Exile ,

Russia and Beyond

by Nathalie Apouchtine. 

It was a buzzing group of writers and family and friends that filled the Judith Wright Room at the Writing Centre last Saturday to witness this launch and to  congratulate her  on the final book here and to  wish Nathalie all the best.

It is published by  Riverton Press 2024

No Way Back: Revolution and Exile, Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine spans three generations, three continents and nearly 100 years. Her family left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, some travelled alone, some in groups, many lived in France, very few of them ever returned to Russia. But some of their descendants did, including Nathalie, who has done magnificent research to document the personal telling of her family’s story amid the historical events they witnessed and experienced.

The book includes a photo section where we see the continuity of life: men of one generation dress in military great coats with medals, while the migrating younger generations wear simple worker’s garb, and later, the family finally puts down roots in new lands. As with refugees everywhere, this is no small achievement.

A story of exile and migration, one that continues to resonate in today’s troubled world.

I am very pleased to have a promotion on the back cover which reads

No Way back brings alive the story of the Russian Revolution
and the aftermath of exile, through a wonderfully traced family history.
Apouchtine interweaves a reflective history with world history
in an engaging and captivating way . . . No Way Back
is a valuable addition to our Russian history 

Colleen Keating Poet

 

   

Question and AnswerPanel    and Jackie Buswell at the launch.

 

Some friends ctching up at the launch

Review

No Way Back  brings the story of the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of exile alive through a wonderfully traced family history.  It is better than any ordinary history book as the author, Nathalie Apouchtine, weaves a scholarly historic timeline with her ancestors’ stories, personalised by memoirs, diaries, recorded interviews, eye witness accounts, old photos and keepsakes, letters and postcards from throughout the 20th century.  The tapestry even more enlivened as many of the archives have been translated by Nathalie for the first time.

 At one level a journey from a family’s life of contentment to face a world changed dramatically and completely and at another an epic history of an all too familiar experience : violent disruption to traditional ways of life, the mass movement of peoples and exile.  

The threads of this story, their warp and weft are made even more real by the author’s visits in the 1990’s to trace the footsteps of her ancestors. Visits to Smolny Institute  with its checked and bloodied history  Nathalie writes,

Seeing the stately architecture with the winged symbol of the tsars and the peaceful trees and lawns around it on a summer visit in the late 1990s, I tried to picture the scene described by Sergei: the cold, the crowds, the weapons, the rushing about. . .  a place  where my maternal grandmother and three of my great-aunts were students here, music and young female voices would have resonated behind those windows.

Nathalie has the gift of interweaving a personal history with a world history in an engaging and captivating way. In her writing she makes the reader feel we are unravelling the story togethers Never boring. It is a valued addition to history and a good read.

Even where the flight was more orderly and less risky – whether via land or water – the mingled feelings of confusion and fear for the future, and grief at having to abandon the homeland, built on anxiety over the actual logistics of various escapes.  165

 No Way Back is one of those rare books that can give a depth of understanding of historic time, recounting  the idyllic Russian life at the turn of the century  with the unfolding of a changing world before their eyes

 . . .the Civil War effectively ended in November 1920 when the anti-Bolsheviks in the south lost their last bit of territory on the Crimean peninsula. This prompted the biggest surge in the exodus. About 150,000 White troops and civilians – though some historians say many more – sailed away on a flotilla of boats of every size, shape and purpose, their overflowing cargoes of people destined mainly for Constantinople.  . . . The travellers to Constantinople, as well as to other areas adjacent to Russia, would eventually continue on to various parts of Europe, to China, to the New World, and to countries all around the globe. They were now refugees. 

This story will hold you immersed in a tapestry of love and loss of country or Homeland. For any writer a formidable task but here Nathalie skilfully faces the challenge and we the reader are the fortunate ones to read this book and to be forever enriched .

Colleen Keating

 

Book launch invite pdf 7

Echidna Tracks Issue 14: Open Theme edited by Marilyn Humbert and Simon Handsom

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Proud to be included in Issue 14 Summer/Autumn 2025 of Echidna Tracks especially with these talented haikuists.

Thank you to the editors  Marilyn Humbert and  Simon Hanson for their dedication  in working to choose the haiku   for the journal and especially for their sensitive and thoughtful placing of  our work.

northeasterlies . . .
a fleet of bluebottles
sails into Sydney harbour

Corine Timmer

bluebottle tide
silver gulls forage
in seaweed

Vanessa Proctor

ebbing tide—
the beachcomber treasures
her amble

Colleen Keating

low tide
the setting sun sips
from a salt-rimmed glass

Kathryn Reese

 

voices in the night . . .
the stars maintain
their silence

Elaine Riddell

cloudy night vigil—
waiting to see the moon
perfectly full

Andrew Hede

peek-a-boo moon
meandering through the creek
a rakali

Corine Timmer

looking for peace—
a rakali carves V-wakes
across the river

Tony Steven Williams

 

by the river
corellas scramble for space
solitary ironbark

Colleen Keating

 

Hospitality; a reflection by Colleen Keating

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Hospitality: A reflection

Oak of Mamre (Rublev icon)

Hospitality

This is a Russian Icon that I have loved for many years. it has always been a  a centre piece in our home  near the entrance. It speaks to me of hospitaity.  Officially it is called the Oak of Mamre .  A Rublev  icon it is full of symbolism using the Holy Trinity which at his time was the embodiment of unity, peace, harmony, mutual love and humility.  

The icon is based on a story from the Book of Genesis called Abraham and Sarah’s Hospitality or The Hospitality of Abraham (§18). It says that the biblical Patriarch Abraham ‘was sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day’ by the Oak of Mamre and saw three men standing in front of him, who in the next chapter were revealed as angels. ‘When he saw them, Abraham ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth.’ Abraham ordered a servant-boy to prepare a choice calf, and set curds, milk and the calf before them, waiting on them, under a tree, as they ate (Genesis 18:1–8). One of the angels told Abraham that Sarah would soon give birth to a son.

 

 

 

 

Rumi’s mystical poetry often helps me regain perspective on life. In this poem, I love his notion that being human is like being a “guest house.” Unexpected visitors occasionally show up and stay for a while, including some you’d really like to throw out!

Welcoming them and learning what they may have to teach you, or where they may lead you, isn’t always easy. But in my experience, it always pays off — if for no other reason than it hastens the day of their departure!

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

 

I believe practicing hospitality towards the other is key to restoring the civil community
on which democracy  depends. It means finally coming to the realisation there is no other. we are all one , depending on each othere on this small ship of earth .  Hospitlity doesnt mean agreeing with everything

It means listening openly and with respect learning how to build bridges rather than walls. 

Each of us is a “guest house” Our first job is to be good hosts to ourselves , good hosts to each other and out wider and wider.  “Be grateful for whoever comes our way/ for each comes to us / as a guide from beyond.”  Rumi

      

Drawing Sister Mary Brady OP

We have to question our Hospitality as a country when we have reminders of cartoon as those above.  And today with the Rivers of Humanity we see each night on our television we have to wonder how can we be present to this  and what can we do to heal our broken world.? These are the questions we have to humbly grapple with  as a caring person on this planet. 

Prayer for  this Broken World.

Into this world

this demented inn

in which there is  no room for him,

Christ has come ininvited.

His place is with those others

for whom there is no room –

those who do not belong

those who are rejected

who are denied the status of persons

who are tortured, bombed, exterminated.

Thomas Merton.   1965 A modern mystic. 

 

And in this world today I like his final prayer written in New York  in about 1985

 

Another drawing to remind us to work always to build bridges not walls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Komorebi: Sunshine filtering through trees by Colleen Keating

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When I took these photos in the Edna Hunt Sanctuary in Eastwood Sydney NSW while on an early morning walk with Millie (yes I am pleased Millie is there standing with me mesmerised. This was an epiphanic moment for me at the time in 2012  .  I actually stood in  it and it was like the ephemeral thing of  grace falling all around me.  I had to go back and retrieve these photos  to share here on my blog as I had a new experience this morning The story is below .

Komorebi (木漏れ日): Sunshine filtering through the trees

The cello’s dappled flow, with  the guitars sharp strings of light-fall, in the new music by Alisha Redmond  played on the ABC this morning caught my attention for further study. It was titled Komorebi. I googled the word only to find it is  a Japanese word  coined to describe that light that shimmers through leaves and plays its music too on the footfall of your bush track swaying rhythm to the whim of wind at the time. 

There isn’t really an English  word equivalent: we speak of dappled, filtered, light. Spiritually we can speak of our connection with nature, symbolising a harmony that can inspire feeling of awes, tranquility, and sublime beauty. The sight of Komorebi – the dappled sunlight, the shifting shadows, and the leaves aglow with the radiant light – is something that resonates deeply with me. Once walking with Millie in the Sanctuary I  used to live near  the experience of komorebi  was like an epiphany for me at a certain time in my life. 

I googled the word Komorebi to find it defined as

Komorebi 木漏れ日 (pronounced kō-mō-leh-bē) Literally, “sunlight leaking through trees”  this word describes the beauty and wonder of rays of light dappling through overhead leaves, casting dancing shadows on the forest floor.

Another definition states, Japanese term “Komorebi”, for which no simple English translation exists. Yet it is a distinct phenomenon, that anyone who spends time among trees will have enjoyed. roughly translates as “the scattered light that filters through when sunlight shines through trees”. It is made up of three “Kanji” or Chinese characters: “tree” or “trees”, “leaking-through” or “escape”, and “light” or “sun”.

Thank goodness for google for then I met  an  Arboriculturist  on a site called AWA and he becomes poetic doing the research I was going to do as he writes:

Komorebi is especially noticeable when the sun is low, and mist or smoke can add to the effect. The impact of Komorebi to the observer can range from creating a pleasant ambiance for a walk through the woods, to generating feelings of awe – which in the right place at the right time – verges on the transcendental. As an arboricultural consultant, I spend more time than most looking at trees when undertaking tree surveys for planning, and occasional experiences of Komorebi have caught me unaware, and have momentarily transformed the most uninspiring trees in development sites, into something special.

Less technical and more poetical attempts have been made in the English language to capture the event. Without a suitable term, several poets and authors felt compelled to invent their own words:

Dylan Thomas called it “windfall light”, in his poem “Fern Hill”, writing:

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins created the term “shivelight” for: “the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood”’.

The author C.S. Lewis was a fan of these “shafts of delicious sunlight” or “Godlight”, writing: “Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are patches of Godlight in the woods of our experience.”

Despite their efforts, none of these words have caught on.

Komorebi, like several similar terms, highlights the influence of nature and aesthetics that is unique to Japanese culture. 

Perhaps, beyond poets and physicists, there is no need for an English equivalent. The experience – of observing sunlight through trees – might be enough. Indeed, the absence of a comparable word allows respite from the taxonomic rumination that occurs in most other aspects of life, helping Komorebi remain as one of life’s “pure and spontaneous pleasures”.  https://colleenkeatingpoet.com/5925-2/

Adam Winson (Chartered Arboriculturist,)   Photos: Lars van de Goor

The New Year Welcome 2025

colleen Poetry

 New Year – 2025

A new chance at beginnings
like a path of snow without a footprint or a sandy beach with out  a track
not even from  the seagull or crab. 
It is a calendar without a crossed day. 

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us,
new, untouched, full of things that have never been . . .” – Rainer Maria Rilke

So we gather on the eve and wait for the clock to turn over  . . . .  and for one breath we stand.

How long that breath, that moment, that day , only we know.

And then at the next beat in this fast moving, loud and in-your-face world, with all its tensions,
we walk  alone over the sacred uneasy threshold , into where we are overwhelmed
once again with the work that needs to be done, in  our relationships, our families and our world. 

How long we make that one moment is what in some terms is called statio

Statio is “an ancient mystical practice of pausing intentionally in the in-between to create sacred space.

Statio is the pause that makes a threshold, a moment both of waiting and readiness.
It invites us to cultivate hope, courage and resilience by resting right there in the gap,
to find strength in stillness, to gather ourselves in this space between breaths,
even when exhaustion and doubt tempt us towards fear.” from Waymakers.

For me  this 2025  first dawn drew me to set out along the beach near our small get-away on the Central Coast of NSW,  to take in the sunrise of the new year. 
But it was the surprise  of a family of fairy wrens flirting  on my paths and in the scrub by the way where they flitted about giving me a delightful exhibition of males and females and a fledgling. 

 

In the background, the ocean, the blue sky’s vast embrace and the pelicans gliding at the entrance fishing the outgoing tide. I had to smile at the poor fish they survived life in the lake, probably for months, they survived the journey down the channel with fishermen on both sides of the bank out to lure them and at the last leg just as they make the ocean the line of smart pelicans scoop them up into their huge beak.

We enter the new year with a broken world, burdens of war in many guises, the reality of misinformation, disinformation and  the use of chaos  like a river in turmoil becomes muddy the world stirs fear in people and nations’ minds  and the power of Oligarchs  to set the world’s agenda. The world, now a multicultural village dependents on each other until someone wants more than their fair share and greed shows it ugly head. 

And so we  have work to do and as a Daoist i am reminded;

Check your balance, mind, body and emotion. 
The inner power only comes when you are aligned  as one –
your mind ordered,
your feelings at peace
your body aware
then  the inner power will gradually arise
like the morning sun
into the core of your being. 

Tranquillity in a small piece of the world  at peace Black swans and an egret: 1st January 2025

May 2025 bring the peace most of the world craves, hopes for, works for, prays for, wishes for. so we can live in happy carefree groups and bring up our children without fear.

How lucky in one small space,

along Tuggerah Lake

2 spoonbills, a pelican and a white egret

all feeding in peace

day one of 2025

 

 

 

 

New Year Mystery by Colleen Keating

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New Year Mystery

Black garbage bags, knife and gloves murmur mystery 
as the two of us stride out along the berm of the lake 
past the pelicans fishing the channel on the incoming tide 
past the cormorants, gulls and Little terns at the edge
pause to admire the delicate grey heron in the bull rushes.

It was further along the littoral shore amidst the swamp oaks
where day-trippers, overnighters, drifters had left rubbish –
a place to use our power  to help in the one small way we could.

Yet the day expanded into a bigger mystery. A whimper
from a plump, fluffy kookaburra  alone on the ground caught 
our attention. In the tree tops there was kookaburra mayhem
The chick stayed like a statue until i moved closer and it lifted
of, flapped its way onto a low branch. An hour later on the walk
back, looking more like an orphan, it remained motionless
with more the pose of an owl. There was still noisy agitation
from the large palm, not a kookaburra laugh but a droning call
and  here we were powerless to help.

Colleen Keating

   

Julie Mehretu (A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory) The Experience by Colleen Keating

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Picture above  – The New Dawn

Julie Mehretu

(A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory)

Images crowd our minds, thoughts scramble . . .
This overload of information you use multilayered 
to blot out story, our words, thoughts, judgement  . . .
we are left with the blur  . . .sweeping lines, 
shapes,  stencils, that disrupt and interweave 
within the frame

Where is space 
in this world for the soul?

Shadows mingle on the hanging canvass
each viewer a presence, smudged, smothered,
each of us shading the overlay.  
Image after image is transformed – 
morphs into the abstract

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to roam?.

Images crowd in to be our burden – Californian fires, 
flames, firestorm, Grenfell Tower torching sky- 
humans, ethnic cleansing, Rohingya conflict,
trail of black ash, the Burning Bush  that consumes.
Image after image 

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to be free?.

You overlay, overlay to transform. 
Blurred towards abstraction. Each physical event 
experienced and now you remind us this is not us , 
this is not our world. Even as I step close 
in search of a bird, a feather, even wisp of a wing 

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to fly?  

                                                                                                                                               
Before the canvass titled New Dawn I weep.
Darkening, with pace of time, race for information 
what do we know? What have we done? 
Our tiny ones have only a small place 
of gold horizon to be born and spread their wings.

Where is space  
in in this crowded noisy shattered world? 

Is it you who give us the space within, no words 
of containment, no pidgin-holing of our being, no longer
reduced to body, skin, national identity
rather a trajectory for a more complex way
to imagine a better world.  In this motion 
are we on the verge of collapse or the brink of transition?

A space where our soul 
can breathe and love again. 



There are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in.
It’s overwhelming.  . .the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate.
I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate
these complexieites and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place – Julie Mehretu

 

The Magritte Experience by Colleen Keating

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René Magritte

‘There is more than what one knows’  M.

Memories are water, deep, brooding and primal
with eyes closed, seeing  another way

who knows 
who

 The crow perches 
 holds the question

The thought is the image – apple thought, cloud,   grey 
everyman  
brush – paints ideas  . . . reality is senseless 
as is god  

Time folds into itself 
it is all here,   from eternity,  forever  

Familiar is no longer 
as  pipe is not  pipe

the bird perched on top of the cage 
still the question

The dove of the sky  holds the clouds 
with hundreds of other I gaze at gazing

no word . . .  no

My daughter, laid low with a broken ankle 
asks to live vicariously through me 

and seeing it through her eyes is seeing it twice 
doubley asking the question

 

         

Magritte’s trademark images of clouds, seascapes, bowler-hatted men,  pipes, apples. 
Some complained theat his work is anti -painting  – cultivated for its unreality and strangeness.

Surrealist painter and provocateur René Magritte  created some of the  most memorable images of the 20th century.
In a way with his slanted way of seeing he reveals the mystery and poetry embedded within seemingly
ordinary objects and everyday settings.