WA Poets Publishing (WAPP) was formed in 2020 and is the formalised extension of the publishing that was originally conducted under WA Poets Inc. It has arisen partly from the scale back of publishing opportunities for poets in Western Australia and operates as a sub group of WA Poets Inc. WAPP publishes emerging to eminent Western Australian poets in high quality, short run publications whilst the anthologies, Creatrix, Poetry d’Amour, and Brushstrokes also include national and international contributing poets. Currently, WAPP relies on volunteers for its production including the editorial panel comprising Lucy Dougan, Jean Kent, Barbara Temperton and Dennis Haskell AO who freely donate their considerable experience and time to ensure that WAPP publications are of the highest standard.
WA Poets Inc is a Not-for-Profit organisation and profits from the sale of merchandise are used to help cover the cost of supporting, developing and promoting WA poets and poetry.
WA Poets Publishing publishes in Boorloo/Perth on the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people and pays its respects to their continuing culture.
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MASTER POETS SERIES
Dennis Haskell ‘And Yet…’
A warm summer’s evening. I sat listening to Dennis read: the philosopher and the critic were everywhere; his thoughts mischievous as light on waves.
His words, his lines, his craft appear to be ever more simple, ever more refined.
These days, the poems can unbutton your soul. Filled with love and loss, they are raindrops falling on parched earth, parched lives.
Tony Curtis
Ireland from “Big Skies, Inner Rain”
‘I want to write, and read, poems of emotional and intellectual power that mostly eschew rhetoric, avoid any sort of gimmickry while making a rich use of the English language, and seem to have demanded to be written. Contra some contemporary theorists I think the lyric is very much alive, rhyme can be a wonderful poetic technique, and in a collection I try to provide variety, including some comic poems. They have long been in short supply in modern poetry, and humour, I believe, is a key element of wisdom.’
Dennis Haskell
‘Writing poetry, for me, is an acknowledgement of purpose—the reification of a belief that commitment and action can bring positive change. Hopefully, through acts of remembering, we can respect and conserve, and through intervention we can interrupt negative mutability and prevent unnecessary loss.
So many of these poems are concerned about being in ‘place’ and the responsibilities this entails. So many of them come at a tangent to greater ecological concerns, to questions of ‘involvement’ in temporal-spatial relations.’
John Kinsella
Barbara Temperton ‘Ghost Nets’
“In Ghost Nets, Barbara Temperton writes poignantly of many kinds of loss, yet these memorable poems also find joy in the vivid details of the natural world and everyday life.”
Tracy Ryan
“Barbara Temperton has managed that rare thing, finding a methodology to present stories in verse that are also mosaics of impression and intimate observation of specific places.”
John Kinsella
on Southern Edge
Maree Dawes ‘Living on Granite’
‘Like the small, spiky flower that grows on granite outcrops, these poems are “nitty gritty down to earth”. Maree Dawes writes sharply, graphically of the natural world and the often-disturbing contradictions of our human presence in it.’
Tracy Ryan
‘Living on Granite is a beautiful collection. Reading Maree Dawes’ poetry is like taking a long, rewarding walk with a knowledgeable, honest translator of experience, environments and people.’
Barbara Temperton
Miriam Wei Wei Lo ‘Who Comes Calling?’
There are so many gifts here: History experienced as history lived in a body; kindness and the difficulty of kindness; tender and patient reflection in the presence of pain. In the face of bullet holes. This is a work of generational, locational and situational introspection that yields, at its own life—fruiting pace, a gleaning—of courageous clear- seeing; of compassion addressed to contradiction and contention; of empathy. I am thankful it came calling.
Alvin Pang
Amy Lin ‘Infinte Ends’
Infinite Ends is an expansive collection. Presented chronologically, it is Blakeian in its transition from innocence to experience. Intelligent, direct and nuanced Lin’s poems enquire and question, explore and wrestle with ideas and experiences. They are muscular and contemplative and plumb relationships with people and place using a variety of forms and styles. Sometimes deeply personal they share the universality of grief and loss without sentimentality but with a raw directness. These are brave poems. There are also poems of joy, shared memory and meaning. Infinite Ends holds the reader close, rewards with vivid images, moments of wry humour and an understated tenderness.
Julie Watts
Carolyn Abbs ‘Why She Gave Me the Painting’
The poems are conspicuously visual, shimmering with colour or emphatically monochrome. They offer the reader a discovery of dance, sculpture, theatre, painting; an experience of the tactile, movement and texture.
Carolyn Abbs
Moving between Australia and her English birthplace, the poems offer an apparently effortless authenticity of voice and an admirable attentiveness to others, including strangers, birds and insects, and considerateness towards them. We live in a time desperately needing such humaneness and here it is: in a variety of poetic forms Abbs is always verbally astute.
Emeritus Professor
Dennis Haskell, AM
Andrew Lansdown ‘ Filling the Emptiness’
Underlying my desire to write poems is a love of the English language, the muscle and majesty of it when arranged through the skilful use of metaphor, alliteration, parallelism, rhyme, consonant rhyme, cadence, meter, syllabic meter, understatement, allusion, anacoluthon, zeugma, synaesthesia, incremental repetition, meaningful ambiguity, set structure, intuitive lineation, and other poetic devices. I never tire of the power and beauty with which words can clothe and communicate thoughts and emotions. I am constantly striving for the oh! and ah! of poetry—the just-look! and the just-so! of it.
Andrew Lansdown
Nicholas Hasluck ‘For Moviegoers; New and Selected Poems’
‘It seemed fitting to me that I should think of this book of verse as being essentially for avid moviegoers and, accordingly, draw upon some of my own excursions into a widely desired and constantly intriguing realm. Readers will gather from these remarks, and from the book itself, that I have been affected by an appreciation of poetry throughout my life and, in the writing of poetry, I have undoubtedly been influenced by insights of the kind mentioned in this Introduction. Poetry and art. They keep me alert.’ Nicholas Hasluck
EMERGING POETS
Colin Young ‘Between Stations’
The poems in Between Stations take us into the city, the landscape, the heart and the hidden world of the imagination. Here we encounter an array of characters who are on the greatest journey of all – life itself. Here, we protest against a heteronormative way of seeing the world and delve, heart-first, into the alchemy where friendship and love begin.
The poetry of Between Stations captures the momentary flashes of light that beam between bodies in motion, bodies moving together, bodies falling in love.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Laurie Smith ‘Permission to Roam’
Australian poetry gains a new voice which is by turn playful, witty and philosophical. Though he writes his poems in plain English, with a recognisably colloquial blend of expertise and yarning, Laurie’s talent was honed over decades of scientific discipline, taxonomy and the spare syntax of sample-labelling. Many of his lines are as succinct, challenging and entertaining as cryptic crossword clues. He is as deft with words on the page as he had been decoding and cataloguing the wild as a naturalist.
Annamaria Weldon
Fran Graham ‘A Gentle Outward Breath’
Fran Graham writes with compassion and empathy for others. Travel in China and elsewhere is specked with colourful images and a warmth of words that continues into the heart of the collection. Love poems appear like secrets, rich with the power of the personal and bold with desire, the tenderness of touch.
Carolyn Abbs
Tim Kinsella ‘Wingbeat’
Wingbeat is filled with precision and heart. Here, Tim Kinsella contemplates the immensity of it all by standing still and observing, listening and celebrating. Astute and assured, this is a superb debut from an exciting young poet.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Tim Kinsella is a poet from Western Australia with a deep interest in the natural world and all forms of art and has spent time living in Britain, Ireland and Germany. His work has placed in poetry awards and been published in literary journals.
Ross Jackson ‘Suited to Grey’
Ross Jackson brings us poems which encompass both the greying, down to earth realities of existence witnessed through ageing eyes and a pervasive wonder at the world.
Jean Kent
Ross Jackson refers to ‘grey’ as a ‘soft’ and ‘moderate’ colour, and he knows his poems well. His poetic is that of a calm, perceptive observer of the people, sites and environments in which he finds himself.
Dennis Haskell
Rita Tognini ‘Almost Like Home’
Almost Like Home illuminates that when we change homelands, we expand identity and perspective, ways of understanding both the self and the world, become someone new.
Shey Marque
The tantalising title of Rita Tognini’s collection points to a poet exploring many questions about Australia and her place in it.
Dennis Haskell
ANTHOLOGIES
Emerging Poets and Pathways Program
Becoming Known: Emerging Poets 2020
To be an emerging writer is to be filled with promise and hope. It’s that stage in your writing career where you wrestle, daily, with your own uncertainty as you learn to forge a clear voice, learn to forge your own unique path. Yes, it is fraught with doubt and rejection letters. But the true emerging writer is one who perseveres. Of course, community is invaluable in fostering resilience: community lifts you up, guides you, helps where they can.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Changes: A Pathways Chapbook 2022
Changes is full of light and dark. Here are poems that speak of the fear or ennui we might be feeling about the environment or the human condition. But it also contains poems that embrace joy, lift up the human spirit, shine a light toward an uncertain future. One we can travel toward with hope in our heart. There is a balance in this anthology that will take you to places that may seem brutal, but they will open to a multitude of possibilities.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Sepia Songs: A Pathways Chapbook 2023
The poems in this collection contain memories that make us want to go back in time, re-examine the poignant moments. If only we could remember how we really were …
Shey Marque
Poetry d’Amour Anthologies
Selected poems from the annual Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Contests from 2015 to now
Henry David Thoreau writes, there is no remedy for love but to love more. But how do we love more or even less? Who sets the benchmark for love, and what of love itself? How to express in words the ache, the feeling, the loss, the passion, the impossibility, the agony, the silence of love?
Rose van Son
Brushstrokes Anthologies
Selected poems from the annual Ros Spencer Poetry Contests from 2016 to now
What a collection! These poems will hopefully entrance, move, terrify, mystify, amuse, and leave readers wondering at the huge range of experience and wisdom encapsulated in their condensed images and succinct phrases.
Colin Young
Creatrix Anthologies
Selected poetry and haiku from the ejournal “Creatrix”
The Creatrix Anthology of selected poetry and haiku is sourced from the online journal Creatrix. The contributions come primarily from members of WA Poets Incorporated and represent a sample of current poetry forms.