hutt 0.2
 
 
 
Peter Minter is a poet, editor and publisher living in Sydney, where he lectures in Indigenous Studies at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. His first chapbook of poems, Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin, was shortlisted for the 1996 NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, and his first full-length collection, Empty Texas, won the 2000 Age Poetry Book of the Year. He is Poetry editor for Meanjin, co-editor of the anthology Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and was recipient of the 2000 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry. His work has been anthologised in various Australian and international anthologies, and has appeared internationally in the special Australian editions of Poetry Review, Verse, The Atlanta Review, and The Literary Review. He is presently writing a new manuscript, blue grass, and the complete volume of his Morning, Hyphen series has just been launched at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetics by Equipage Press.

 

  
   
peter minter - two from 'real lyrical'

1.
But it is here that I begin.

I look again into your books
      & you say just do nothing. The sky
      breaks then, outside, black water
peels over a dry street into leaves
      the local real-estate
      described yesterday as privacy

Floats away to fill the harbour
      in a vacuous dispersal. Next door
      they turn up the sound,
the downpour unfeathering odes
      bush branches
      sprung wet & broken as a tongue

Sampling a car top drumming
      or whispering alone
      Willie O Winsbury, or a fire
trembling no less for I
      am grass, & you are green
      our cold sweat floating off sideways.

2.
By morning, reality tastes like moss.
      The full arc of hollow wind, the light
      spells in glassy beads
a centre to your levelled gaze
      as you read me soft and sweetly out
      root verses of inconsequence.

Cold Pacific air has us flush
      with speculation, the entire city saturate
      & lime-lit. Not art, but life is here,
your hands sense of air and earth
      flesh coloured like pelagic spheres
      writ in estuaries of sex.

Beauty is routine, the ‘end of ideology’
      hopelessly uncanny, atmospheric pressure
      pushing shoals of mullet up the coast
like circumstantial undertow.
      Avoid involving monocultures, do lines
      of pure nostalgia, desolate finesse.