The Dot Special

Someone in the Weekend Australian Review recently panned Dorothy Porter’s The Bee Hut, saying that many of the poems were simplistic (you don’t need a doctorate in the Towers of Mani to understand them), repetitive (quick, someone tell *Homer et al.), and lacking in luminosity (hello, it’s a book not a Dolphin torch)

As they say on TSFKA, one man’s Bukowski is another woman’s Blake. I think Porter’s poems are more shining and lyrical than Apollo’s lyre. This book is grouse, peoples

I can't give you a whole poem, due to copyright, so I’m going to read some of my favourite lines from The Bee Hut. (Please turn off your mobile phones or I will shoot you)

Because I love synchronicity, I will start with this:

How can I write
On water?

Do the fish
Do the giant squid
Read?

(from LAST ARIA FROM THE ETERNITY MAN)

Every poet wants to write the poem
that penetrates
with the ice-cold shock
of the Devil’s prick.

The poem that will fuck you awake
or kill you.

(from THREE SONNETS, I. Is it not the thing?)

and all my living
and all my dead
run up my arms
like squirrels.

(from A WALK IN KENSINGTON GARDENS)

No poet
dead or alive
should rot
with their parents.

(from CHARLE’S BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE)

We were never married, Dido.
Believe me, I’m sad too that you can’t
sweeten me and I can’t comfort you.

(from AENEAS REMEMBERS DOMESTIC BLISS)

Waiting.
Starched hospital gown.
Frozen present tense.
Why am I smelling
tigers?

(from SMELLING TIGERS)

* as in legendary ancient Greek epic poet, not as in yellow dude with doughnut