Selected Poems

Larry Buttrose

Contents

About the Author

Foreword

Note on screen display of poetry

Eau de vie

The Morning

London Fields

Pimlico

In Praise of Public Kissing

Sponge Cake

Sexual Congress

The Buddha’s Bum

Toast

The Ants

My Country

My Decade in Journalism

Thou Art

A Coal Train Called John

The Diaspora of China

When All Else Fails, Read the Instructions

Another Day

Laura

The Hunt

The Dash of Dot

Occasionally

Henley Beach Scene

Seamed Stockings

The Gas Station in American Cinema

Will Not Love Him

Politics

Territory

Unburied Dead

Foro Romano

Cats

The Almost Politician

Happy Days

Old Labor Leaders

A Man, Almost

Centennial Park Ditty

Pony Express

Within

Thought for the Day

The Angels

Sister

Sleep

The Dark Telephone

Two Kangaroos

Fat on no Love

Two

Approximate Spouses

Eternity

Catgut String Theory

Ghostless

Byron Gentry At Sunset

Freight Movement

Disc-oh!

Curtains

Index of first lines

Poem dates by year

About BryshaWilson Press

About the Author

Larry Buttrose

Selected Poems

The poem is a beast of its own will

Slipping unseen through our lofty mists

Larry Buttrose Eau de Vie

This selection of poems by Larry Buttrose represents a forty-year output and although many of the poems have been published before, either as single offerings or inclusions in anthologies, this is the first time that such a range of the poet’s work has been gathered in one volume.

The poet has arranged the order in which the poems appear. Because the sequence is not chronological, a list of dates by year for the writing of each poem is also included.

Larry Buttrose is an Australian writer whose published works include poetry, novels and plays, as well as an extensive range of non-fiction and journalism.

He trained as a journalist with the ABC and holds a BA and PhD from the University of Adelaide.

National Library of Australia listing for Larry Buttrose: http://trove.nla.gov.au/people/458941?q=larry+buttrose&c=people

Wikipedia listing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Buttrose

The range and quality of his output make Larry Buttrose one of the most versatile, accomplished and interesting authors writing in Australia today. As a publisher of quality books of cultural worth, BryshaWilson Press is proud to issue two titles by Larry Buttrose: this first edition of Selected Poems and The Muse of the Maze (BryshaWilson Press, 2016, eBook), a new, extensively revised edition of the novel originally published in 1998, as The Maze of the Muse, by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Selected Poems is available in paperback format from BryshaWilsonPress.com and as an eBook from Amazon and Kobo.

This edition first published in Australia in 2017 by

BryshaWilson Press ABN 60 010 047 410

bryshawilsonpress.com © 2017 Larry Buttrose

Acknowledgement is made for poems published in Best Australian Poems 2012 and 2009, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Overland, Meanjin, Westerly, Ulitarra, Wingbeats, Poet’s Choice and A Return To Poetry 2000, Poetica on Radio National for Byron Gentry at Sunset, and Varuna the National Writers Centre’s Poet-A-Day online for My Country and A Coal Train Called John. Some of these poems also appeared in the collections The Leichhardt Heater Journey and Learning Italian.

Cover image: old tourist map of Seville, collection of Larry Buttrose

The right of Larry Buttrose to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

All rights reserved. Apart from any use as permitted by the Copyright Act of 1968, no part of this work may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without written permission from the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Buttrose, Larry, 1952– author.

Title: Selected poems / Larry Buttrose

ISBN: 9781925535044 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781925535020 (ebook : epub)

Subjects: Poetry—Collections. Australian poetry.

To my darlings Belle and Ada

Selected Poems

By way of introduction

I have followed the poems of Larry Buttrose as they appeared over the years, cutting some from newspapers. Rodney Hall often published them in The Australian. Now we have this fine Selected Poems and in this context the poems prove they are more than keepers, radiating imagination, wit and lyrical power. There are beautiful lyrics and edgy ballads along with elegies. Larry Buttrose uses agile rhymes and traditional forms, however his touch is light and tinged with dark humour. He writes of death hovering and time passing, yet the figure of an angel often appears in sunlight. We can’t tell whether wit or a more profound note keeps the lines on their toes; there are risks with technique as well as subject matter, all successful. There is human interaction with nature, lyrical narratives and love poems. It’s a book by a poet who can praise life and yet sting when he looks at what we have brought upon ourselves. It is a surprising book, the work of a brilliant poet.

Robert Adamson

A remarkable collection. I found valued friends here, and made new ones.  Buttrose is one of our most indispensable poetic voices.

Geraldine Brooks

Sweet, funny, savage, sumptuous, sad, these poems taste of Larkin and Eliot but mostly, ruthlessly, of Buttrose.

Elizabeth Farrelly

Larry Buttrose’s poems disrobe and contemplate the great existential truths of life: love, desire, memory and death. They unveil a sensibility that engages the world with passion, honesty and at times a wry, humorous scepticism, “cries of desperate love and love’s despair” finely attuned with “that unfailing stare within, dark as the pith of a star”. Read and be enlightened.

Peter Minter

Note on screen display of poetry

Except in the case of large desktop screens, the poems display best in single page view. To see stanza or line formatting on the screen as intended by the poet, in a few instances it may be necessary to adjust display depending on the device used for reading. This can be done by reducing text size or enlarging the display area. The poem most likely to need display adjustment is The Dash of Dot which has stanzas of three long lines each.

Eau de vie

Our phrases and syllables fuse alchemically

Transcending the sum of their parts; intoxicatedly,

The poem is a beast of its own will

Slipping unseen through our lofty mists,

Down the valleys and vales to the plains,

Where one may read its tracks and hear its tread.

Through some inexplicable astronomical singularity

We are the droplets of that enclosing mist,

Together constituting the eau de vie

Through which the beast invisibly steps;

We have no notion of what it is, this eau de vie,

Other than that, miraculously, it is you, as it is me.

The Morning

The morning comes

Which you don't see

A dirty morning

Of grit and sleet

A perfect morning

Of sun and breeze

Which you don't see

You’ve had your mornings

You missed them

London Fields

The night my girl flew to Paris

the phone rang and I thought

it’s her but heard the voice

of a man I did not know saying

I had fucked up and he knew where

I was and was coming to get me.

His voice had a Kray Twins sort

of authenticity and sneered as I said

I don’t know you I’ve never met you.

I’m coming to get you he said

I’m coming there to get you now.

That we lived in a flat atop

a large Edwardian home and thus

I had two front doors between me

and that voice was of some comfort,

though not complete. Some days later

when our old blue Triumph Herald

was stolen the police found it

a few streets away the wiper blades

twisted oddly like the arms of a man

imprisoned in a dungeon somewhere

down the East End or so it felt.

I got casual work in Fleet Street

left the Reuters building at dusk

got off at Highgate. By the tube

was a pub The Woodman where I drank

a pint or so then walked the dark

Queen’s Wood ten minutes to my door

love poems in my head for my girl

as I strolled beneath the trees.

One night voices hard and close

I heard two men crashing through

the woods walking fast with purpose.

Years later home in Australia I read

of Dennis Nilsen a former army cook

he had killed fifteen boys and men

picked them up in The Woodman

drugged killed and butchered

buried parts flushed others fed

entrails to animals got found out

only after neighbours complained

of blocked and smelly drains

in his flat in Cranley Gardens

at the end of our street.

Pimlico

I remember leaving your flat in Pimlico,

Stepping out into the silent square;

It was autumn, leaves in the gutter,

A soft pink sun on the blank faces

Of the tall Georgian row.

The fenced park was locked

To those who lacked the key,

So I walked around it,

Dawdling off to Victoria.

The past is not another country

But another person who is you no more,

Evidenced by the slip of time

In which I never saw you again.

In Praise of Public Kissing

Barely clothed beneath their clothes

They pash, his baseball cap nudging

Her pinned purple black fringe;

The bus lurches, and with a slack grin

His face falls into her lap

Below the Plimsoll line of skirt,

And stays there till every neck

Aches from arching: She giggles,

At what, when there are so many choices?

And he resurfaces all out of breath

Gasps and suckers to her mouth, and

They don’t take breath for a full stop.

Sponge Cake

Sexual Congress

The Buddha’s Bum

Toast

The Ants

My Country

My Decade in Journalism

Thou Art

A Coal Train Called John

The Diaspora of China

When All Else Fails, Read the Instructions

Another Day

Laura

upon the death of Robert Graves

The Hunt

The Dash of Dot

Occasionally

Henley Beach Scene

Seamed Stockings

The Gas Station in American Cinema

Will Not Love Him

Politics

Territory

Unburied Dead

Foro Romano

Cats

The Almost Politician

Happy Days

Old Labor Leaders

A Man, Almost

Centennial Park Ditty

Pony Express

Within

Thought for the Day

The Angels

Sister

Sleep

The Dark Telephone

Two Kangaroos

Fat on no Love

Two

Approximate Spouses

Eternity

Catgut String Theory

Ghostless

Byron Gentry At Sunset

Freight Movement

Disc-oh!

Curtains

Index of first lines

Poem dates by year

About BryshaWilson Press

BryshaWilson Press is an Australian artisan publisher of quality books selected on the basis of literary merit or other cultural worth. We specialise in the production of eBooks but in response to demand we are now also issuing some titles in hard print format.

Using the revolutionary possibilities of digital publishing and on-line sales, we are able to bypass traditional print for profit business models and mass-market imperatives in bringing the works of our authors to a discerning readership.

Our special interests are in literary writings of all genres; poetry; works dealing with any area of the arts and popular culture; histories, biographies and scholarly works for a general readership; works on any aspect of dance from general interest to highly specialised.

From time to time, we also on-sell volume (hard print) editions of self/privately or independently published works that likewise fit our criteria but have been unable to reach their readership through traditional shop sales.

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