Event Poems

Event, the first book by Australian poet Judith Bishop, is the work of a border-crosser. Emotionally intense, formally inventive and musical, with influences ranging from Ted Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop to Yves Bonnefoy, these poems have won prestigious awards in Australia and the U.S. and feature in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (U.Q.P) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (Black Inc.).. Local and global at once, with a strong naturalist bent, they gather in birds, flora and fauna from across four continents, Australia, North and South America and Europe. Central to the collection is a striking sequence poem which inhabits the voice of the Aztec translator in the Spanish Conquest, La Malinche. Indeed, the human voice – a form of breath, but “irreversible” in what it says and does – performs the principal role in this book’s erotic theatre of love and betrayal. Event is, above all, a book of intimate dialogues between a human self and her others: lovers, animals, elements of the natural world, and deities, some distant, some destroyed. Wind, too, has a leading part, taking on the dual role of a natural force and of something close to fate. Rising as if out of nowhere in these poems, wind is a metaphor for the pure nature of events which occur without premonition and without recourse.