Youtor
The Balga
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=xJ3np40yrzM
Glen Phillips reads his poem The Balga from his book with John C. Ryan, Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum. • http://www.pinyon-publishing.com/seei... • COMMENTARY from an interview with Peter Jeffery, poet and former Murdoch University professor. • AUDIO RECORDING by Peter and Julie Jeffery • ART by Glen Phillips • ABOUT SEEING TREES: • “… I walk inwardly / A while towards eternity. … / The seen was not a scene / But a sensation. The trees’ old way of seeing / Bore winged seeds within my being.” (“I Turned the Corner and Entered the Mind of the Forest” JCR) • A collaborative current of respect for the earth, steeped in the forests of Australia—poetry and art rich in science, humanity, philosophy, and memory. Like the Lorax, Ryan and Phillips speak for the trees. What does it mean to be a tree? Perhaps it is time. To look and to listen: “Maybe strange passions moved in us, prompted / by these groves to kneel, loving moonlit land?” (“Coastal Peppermints” GP) • Peopled with Noongar, Wadjuk, Jdewat—we sense our part in the vast history. With the trees, we claw: “skyward towards a portal of light” (“Inside a Jarrah Tree …” JCR). Tension fueled through the human propensity for destruction, unleashed as through raging bushfires. “And then the startled crack / of the still-burning heart / of a once-living casuarina. / … We shutter behind eyelids / each lingering backward glance / to the fire we let consume us.” (“Charred Ground” GP) • Poems assume shapes of mighty sheoaks and charismatic balgas, orchestrated with primal percussion and intricately layered language. The reader explores the literal limbs of poems as their forms reach out like branches and leaves. Masters of sculpting the intangible onto the page, Ryan and Phillips help us explore new ways of seeing and listening. An invitation, youthful traveler—rise out of the sea, inhale eucalypts, taste dust and sun, glimpse a leaf. • ABOUT THE AUTHORS: • Born in the United States, John C. Ryan is a poet, critic, ethnographer, and naturalist who lived in Australia for more than a decade. His poetry focuses on the plant life of Australia, North America, and Southeast Asia. His published poetry books include Two With Nature, New Perspectives on Tablelands Flora, Primavariants (with Glen Phillips), The Earth Decides, and Seaweed: A Book of Algae. He edited an issue of Plumwood Mountain on the theme “plant poetics” and co-edited the scholarly books The Language of Plants and Australian Wetland Cultures. • Born in Southern Cross, Australia, Glen Phillips was educated in country schools and in Perth, WA. He graduated from the University of WA with First Class Honours in 1957 and MEd (1967). He gained his PhD in Writing from Edith Cowan University (2007). Glen has taught English Literature for nearly 60 years, locally and overseas, especially in China. He is Director of the ECU International Centre for Landscape and Language. More than 60 of his books (50 being his poetry) have been published. Poems also appear in some 40 world anthologies and many national and international journals. Recent books include The Moon Belongs to No One, Singing Granites, Gold in Granite, and In the Hollow of the Land. • • MUSIC: Bartok's Kitty, Kitty
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