Editorial
It’s mid-June as I write this from the Bouddi Peninsula, traditional Country of the Darkinjung Aboriginal People, a good hour’s drive north of Sydney. I’m staying here for a few days while rain damage to my home is repaired. I like it here. The ginkgo tree outside my window is shedding gold fans onto the wet timber deck.
Like my fellow editors, Natalie and Daragh, I’m no stranger to home away from home. A few months ago, I reached that equilibrium where I’ve now lived in Sydney for as many years as I lived in Ireland. We’re approaching the shortest day of the year—or the longest, depending on where you live. The solstice is the time of greatest imbalance between hemispheres, a reminder of the distance and difference between Australia and the countries in which we grew up.
At a book launch in Dublin last year, chatting to a small group of poets, I was asked by one, ‘Who are you reading?’ Responding with the names of a string of Australian poets, I could see she wasn’t familiar with any of them. I had similar conversations throughout that week, with poets at various stages of their writing careers. The take-home message was clear: barring a few exceptions, the best work of Australian poets, both contemporary and canonical, was not on the radar of these fine contemporary poets. They were also writing in English from another part of the Anglosphere, separated by a mere 10 thousand miles, an 11-hour time difference and a reversal of seasons.
Australian poetry is a trove of riches. Picking up any volume of Best of Australian Poems from the last few years, one will encounter an extraordinary range of style, form, tone and subject. The talent is on par with anything written in, or translated into, English anywhere. Asking ourselves if the world needs another poetry journal, we were buoyed by the idea that The Marrow might play a small role in bringing the voices of Australian and international poets together in one virtual place, to widen readership and close distances.
The Marrow seeks to honour the work that goes into producing poems written across and beyond the English-speaking world. We are thrilled that this inaugural issue includes poetry from around Australia as well as from Ireland, Greece, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We hope that future issues will further extend this list.
For Issue One, our editors invited poets—Australian and international, emerging and established—to contribute new work. Here we have poets whose books have received the highest accolades alongside those who have yet to publish a first collection. This first issue features a chorus of voices, diverse in writing experience, recognition, subject matter, style, age, geographic location, experience and perspective. Genre-bending new work from Jason Allen-Paisant sits alongside Vasiliki Albedo’s distilled lyric. Despite this diversity, we were struck by the synergies that emerged in our selection—the unexpected but clear threads and harmonics that connected poems written by all of these poets, many of whom are unknown to each other. We trust our readers will find even more connections.
We are also pleased that this first issue includes previously unpublished work from a number of fabulous new or forthcoming collections: Sue Lockwood’s debut The Flowering Dark, Ricky Ray’s Aryamati prize-winning collection The Soul We Share, a mind-bending pair of mirror poems from Jakob Ziguras’s Venetian Mirrors, and the intriguing opening sequence from Jo Burns & Emily Cooper’s The Conversation.
The Marrow will be open for submissions throughout July for Issue Two, which will be published in October. We are drawn to finely-crafted poems regardless of form. Apart from the perennial subjects, we’re also attracted to subjects that haven’t perhaps been spot-lit on the traditional poetry landscape. Who could resist the horror of pubescent ovulatory pain in Molly Twomey’s ‘Almost snapped my neck’ or the sheer bizarreness of Munira Tabassum Ahmed’s ‘The Boy Who Turned Into Butter’? At The Marrow, we don’t care how old or young you are. The age range of poets in this issue spans six decades. We tend to go for poems over poets, craft over subject. Find out more on our submissions page.
Enjoy Issue One!
Audrey Molloy, co-editor
