Printed Shadows – 40 Years plus of Writing and Cultural Journalism

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  • My shortlisted poem, ‘Theory of flight for two voices’, appears in ‘Poetry of Flight: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology’

    Earlier this year I was excited and honoured to be short-listed for the 2025 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize and this coming Thursday the resulting anthology, Poetry of Flight, will be launched by Zoom.

    “The 2025 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize invited poets to respond to the broad topic of ‘flight’ – and to take it in whatever direction they wished. Perhaps being in flight from something, or towards new places, experiences or elements. Perhaps knowing the ecstatic flight of emotions or the spirit, or an engagement with the feathered world of what inhabits air and branch…

    The astounding stylistic and thematic range of poems in this Longlist do what powerful art always does – they offer the reader the insights, connection and joy which enable us to live our lives for the better.

    This anthology has the 51 poems of the Longlist, including the winners.”

    If you want to catch some of the contributors to the anthology read their poems on Thursday night you can book your Zoom place here: https://liquidamberpress. com.au/events/ where you can also purchase copies of the anthology.

     

  • Mark Roberts and The Office of Literary Endeavours at Live Poets at Don Bank

    Live Poets at Don Bank, 6 Napier St, North Sydney open at 7.30 pm. Entry of $10 (cash preferred) includes supper and drinks in the courtyard. 

    I am looking forward to reading from The Office of Literary Endeavours this coming Wednesday night at Live Poets at Don Bank in North Sydney. This will be my first reading since returning from Ireland and I am looking forward to reading again in the Southern Hemisphere! If you are in Sydney on Wednesday night it would be great to see you – Live Poets is always fun.

     

    On Wednesday, October 22nd we welcome MARK ROBERTS who will introduce us to ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours’. Mark is a poet who cuts through on issues: ‘one of our more honest voices’. There will also be a feature: ‘Poets as Witness (How word-persons process experience)’ and of course our celebrated OPEN SECTION for poets, short story writers and musicians. Doors of Don Bank at 6 Napier St, North Sydney open at 7.30 pm. Entry of $10 (cash preferred) includes supper and drinks in the courtyard.
    Bookings/More information please email Danny Gardner. Come for the camaraderie of 35 years!

  • The Office of Literary Endeavours – Sydney Book Launch

    5 Island Press invites you to the launch of this stunning new poetry collection from Mark Roberts, co-editor of Rochford Street Review and the occasional poetry journal P76.

    The Office of Literary Endeavours with be launched by Les Wicks; Angela Stretch will be your MC.
    Time & Location: 25 May 2025, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm. Benledi House, 186 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe NSW 2037, Australia.
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    This is a free event but please register to assist with planning and catering  https://www. 5islandspress .com/…/ book-launch-the…/form
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    If you can’t make the launch you can buy the book from https://www.5islandspress.com/…/the-office-of-literary…
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    About The Office of Literary Endeavours
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    “This is a book evidencing a life spent in appreciation of poetry, deep observation and participation in ecologies of many kinds. Discomfort is constant but there is succour and reprieve in kin and creative expression. The Office of Literary Endeavours is a wise and reverential book by a gentle and accomplished poet at a high point of their writing life”.
    ………………………………………………………………–AMANDA JOY
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    “The poetry is carefully crafted and elegant. The subject matter wide ranging and richly brought to life within the forms Roberts has chosen. Reading through this collection has been a privilege and a delight”.
    ………………………………………………………………–LES WICKS
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    “The Office of Literary Endeavours is a witty and insightful collection characterised by its lucidity. The strength of these poems lies in their interrogation of migration and colonisation through poignant familial memories that are never sentimental but always elegiac, with their critique of colonisation and account of Irish dispossession. A feature of the collection is the way it deftly navigates different moods, so that alongside the poems of migration and colonisation there are also poems about the landscape, the passion of lovers, old friendships, and favourite films. A sharply observant eye unites these poems into a cohesive manuscript of layered emotions and experiences”.
    ………………………………………………………………–TINA GIANNOUKOS
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    “Roberts lends his deft touch to subjects and places both new and old, and specifically to what must always resonate as essential to the human condition–continuously, from pram to old age. In his shared memories, real and invented, ancient and modern, a jam jar or two might be shot for target practice, deadly snakes slung over wire fences, trains might be caught or missed. Here is subject matter to engage seasoned poetry readers, as well as keen students of Australian literature and cultural history: a lively content able to both re-trace and advance, often simultaneously”.
    …………………………………………………………………..–JOHN JENKINS
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    “The Office of Literary Endeavours is an excellent collection of poetry that demonstrates the poet’s range, skill, talent, experience and wisdom, along with his willingness to experiment with form (including lines, stanza structures and the shape of the poem) and to engage with crucial contemporary issues (such as Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships to country) as well as European culture and history (as demonstrated through the sequence of poems inspired by films). The book is engaging, accessible, insightful, entertaining, witty and, at times, playful”.
    ………………………………………………………………–NATHANAEL O’REILLY

  • Mark Roberts at the Sydney Poet Lounge – 21 May 2025

    I’m excited to be one of the feature poets, along with JR Grogan, at the Sydney Poetry Lounge at the Glebe Hotel ( 63 Bay Street, Glebe, New South Wales) on Wednesday 21 May from 6.30pm. I will be reading from my new collection, The Office of Literary Endeavours (5 Islands Press 2025).

    Details

    Welcome back to the May 2025 chapter of the Sydney Poetry Lounge, featuring poetry from Mark Roberts, JR Grogan and our incredible open mic! Join us upstairs at The Glebe Hotel for a night filled with powerful spoken word performances and heartfelt poetry.$10 entry, $5 concession, tickets available on the door or via Humanitix. The May SPL Facebook Event 

    Mark Roberts

    For much of the last four decades, Mark Roberts has been involved in writing, criticism and publishing. In 1982, he established P76 magazine with Adam Aitken and has been involved in small press publishing ever since. In 2011 he set up the on-line journal Rochford Street Review with his wife, Linda Adair, which has recently published its 41st issue; the Review is one of the leading (and long-lasting) independent cultural journals around. Mark’s work has been widely published in journal and magazines both in Australia and internationally. He has also published three collections – The Office of Literary Endeavours (5 Islands Press 2025) is Mark’s third book, after Stepping out of Line (Rochford Street Press 1986) and Concrete Flamingos, (Island Press 2016).
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    JR Grogan
    John Robert Grogan (aka: JR) is an Irish-Australian poet based in Sydney, Australia. His childhood in Ireland and wanderings since, spawned a love and curiosity for the connectivity of the natural world and the human condition. He has poems published in a number of anthologies and online at: The Madrigal, Blue Bottle Journal, Live Encounters Magazine and From Whispers to Roars literary magazine. He is one quarter of the SPL team & sometimes known as ‘the voice of reason’. Find on Instagram: @jr_grogan.

  • Michael Witts double book launch at the Shop Gallery Sunday 16 March

    This coming Sunday I will be doing the honours and formally launching not one but two books by Michael Witts at the wonderful Shop Gallery in Glebe Point Road. I first read Michael’s work in 1982, the year Adam Aitken and I started P76 magazine, when Fling Poetry published his third collection, Dumb Music. More recently I have enjoyed more recent work his has been published in various journals and magazines and we now have the pleasure seeing this new work collected together.

    If you are in Sydney this Sunday try and make it to the Shop Gallery to see me launch 28 Sonnets and Some Dualities and. more importantly, hear Michael read from these collections.

  • Four prose poems from ‘Subsidence’ published in Live Encounters Jan 2025


    I have been working on the concept of a novel for a number of years and, while I haven’t progressed very far with the writing of the novel itself, the process has resulted in a number of poems. Among these are a number of prose poems which have just appeared in Live Encounters January 2025. These four pieces are fragments, which one day may fit together … or not.

    Once again many thanks to Live Encounters editor Mark Ulyseas for reaching out and requesting these pieces.

    You can read the poems here https://liveencounters.net/2025-le-pw/mark-roberts-subsidence/

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  • Sydney Premiere – ‘Robert Adamson The Ultimate Commitment’

    I was honoured to be asked to contribute to this “interview documentary” on the life of poet Robert Adamson. I’m also looking forward to the Sydney premiere screening this coming Tuesday night.

    29 October, 6pm-8pm, Metcalfe Auditorium, State Library of NSW. Presented by David Adès, WestWords and the State Library of NSW.

    You can see a 6 minute trailer of the film here https://youtu.be/xniA3hSs3b4?si=Zl-eiEUCmaja91ef

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  • ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours’ to be published by 5 Islands Press

    5IP

    I am thrilled to announce that my next collection, The Office of Literary Endeavours, will be published by 5 Island Press. While it is exciting to have a manuscript accepted for publication, it is also a honour to part of a list that already includes poets like Robyn Rowland, Helen Swain, Michael Leibowitz, Sue Lockwood and Mark Tredinnick, not to mention the eight other poets who will join the list with me in 2025, Helen Jarvis,  David Ades, Benjamin Dodds, Alison Gorman, Helga Jermy, Kai Jensen, Jennifer Kornberger and Kevin Smith.

    5 Islands Press has a long and distinguished history in publishing Australian Poetry, founded by Ron Pretty in 1986 and named after the 5 Islands off the coast of Port Kembla. After Ron stood down in 2007 the press continued for over another decade before publishing it’s last titles in 2019. In late 2023 Mark Tredinneck and Steve Meyrick took over responsibility for the press. A history of the press can be found here. For more information on the current 5 Islands Press publishing program go to the new website.

    I’m looking forward to becoming part of the 2025 5 Island Press publishing program.

  • Just a bit of fun – Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Special Humour Edition, June 2024.

    MARK ROBERTS – THE DEMISE OF POETRY

    Many journals have themed issues but, as guest editor Les Wicks points out in his introduction Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Special Humour Edition, humour is not a theme normally associated with contemporary poetry. Forms such as limericks and nonsense verse obviously have humour at their core, but aren’t really recognised as ‘serious’ literature. Perhaps the first ‘real’ poem which really made made me laugh out loud in public was Chris Mansell’s Definition poem: Pissed as a parrot, which I seem to recall I first heard at a reading upstairs in a strange, secret, vegetarian restaurant in Leichhardt, NSW.

    But onto the issue at hand – my attempt at a humourous poem, The demise of poetry, somehow made the cut and made it into the Live Encounters Special Humour Edition. I hope that it provokes at least the hint of a giggle…….

  • ‘Skipping’ Long listed for the 2023 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize.

    I was a little surprised and very honoured to have had my poem ‘Skipping’ included in the long list for the 2023 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize. The poets nominated in the long list include many writers I respect and seek out so it is exciting to be included in the list with them. Congratulations to all nominated poets and a big thanks to the judges Anne M. Carson, Rose Lucas and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp.

    https://liquidamberpress.com.au/2023/07/14/2023-poetry-prize-long-list-announced/

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  • Film Poems in Oz-Burp Eight

    I haven’t sent much work out over the last 12 months or so, something to do with the pandemic (don’t ask me what), but some of my film poems continue to appear in Pete Spence’s wonderful journals. The latest, Oz-Burp Eight, contains ‘film festival’, ‘The Game of Angels’ and ‘O Lucky Man’.

    Pete has produced some wonderful work and publications over the years and he continues to bring together some amazing writing from around Australia and around the world. This issue, for example, contains work by: Tom Weigel, George Trakl (translated by Tom Weigel), Joel Dailey, Jake St John, John McConnochie, Joahha Walkden Harris & Pete Spence, Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, Elinor Nauen, Annabel Lee, Pete Spence, Mark Young, Richard Martin, Linda Adair, Joahha Walkden Harris, Douglas Messarli, Pam Brown, Chris Mason, Kris Hemensley, Phyllis Rosenzwig, John Jenkins, Cam Lowe, Jim Cory, Mitch Highfill, Dan Raphael, Martin Edmond, Glen Cooper, Chris Barron and Jill Jones.

    Oz-Burp may fly under the radar of many who sail in the good ship Australian Poetry, but it is exciting to have some poems included among the amazing work in this issue of the journal.

    Oz Burp is a hard journal to track down but Rochford Cottage Bookshop has a handful of copies available for sale at $12.95 (plus postage and handling). Click here to order.

    ozburp8cover

  • ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours: Maree’ appears in Postcolonial Text Vol 12, No1 (2017)

    Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee; Dictee Takes the Stage. Photograph by Soomi Kim. The cover of Postcolonial Text Issue 12: No.1

    I am very pleased to have had ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours: Maree’ published in the on-line journal Postcolonial Text. This poem is an interesting one for me as it grew out of a novel I’m attempting to write. As part of my research I was reading a lot of poetry in translation. I found myself increasingly wanting to get ‘behind’ the translation to the poem – to read different translations of the same poem and to use online translation tools and dictionaries to create my own literal translations.

    One of the poets who caught my attention during this time was the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. Cernuda was born in Seville in 1902 and during the Spanish Civil War he found himself forced into exile when he was unable to return from giving a series of lectures in England. Openly homosexual and antifascist Cernuda spent the rest of his life in exile, dying in Mexico in 1961. It was while reading and playing around with Cernuda’s work in translation that I started writing some poems in a style that seemed to me to have a feeling of being translated. This is a hard thing to describe but I guess it is where you look at the multiple meanings behind each word and try and understand different ways of capturing the same idea or image.

    One of the results of this exercise was ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours: Maree’  and you can read it here:

    http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/2204/2039

  • ‘Forgetting is So Long’ – Love Poetry by Australian Men

    Forgetting is so Long: An Anthology of Australian Love Poetry edited by Robbie Coburn & Valli Poole. Blank Rune Press 2016

     

    Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
    ………………………… – Pablo Neruda

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    When we think of anthologies were generally think of larger books with lots of pages so it was exciting to be asked to contribute to a chapbook anthology of Australian love poems. Some years ago I had some poems in the Inkerman & Blunt Australian Love Poetry anthology. That was a huge, diverse and ultimately uneven anthology (as anthologies of that size tend to be). Forgetting is so Long is the opposite – it is a small, beautifully constructed chapbook and it features love poems by men. When I was submitted my poems to Robbie Coburn I was unaware that the anthology would be purely love poems by men but I have been pleasantly surprised by the result and the company in which my two poems have landed. There is a hint here of a different masculinity, something that deserves to be explored in greater depth.

    Along with my work Forgetting is so Long contains poetry by Ashley Capes, Robbie Coburn, Glenn Cooper, Phillip Hall, Ramon Loyola, Pete Spence, David Ellison, Andy Jackson, Ariel Riveros Pavez, Kenneth Smeaton and Les Wicks. It is available from Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne or you can contact the publisher for details on how to acquire a copy blankrunepress@gmail.com

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