Poem by S.J. Holland-Batt

Eyewear is pleased this Bloomsday to, in antipodean style, feature

S.J. Holland-Batt. She was born in Southport, Queensland, grew up in Denver, Colorado, and has been living in St. Lucia, Queensland, as a freelance arts writer for localART.

Her poetry has appeared in Overland, Cultural Studies Review, and was anthologised in 2004 in Straight Out Of Brisbane (SOOB): New Writing. She was recently selected as Vibewire's Poet in Residence. She recently completed a review of a new critical text on Vladimir Nabokov for the American journal Politics and Culture.

I think Ms. Holland-Batt is one of the new voices emerging from Australian poetry we should be keen to follow over the next years, and was glad to feature poetry of hers at Nthposition. Here's a new poem of hers, below:

Hailstorm

We’ve become used to each other—
you don’t yet have a key, but you let yourself
in, and boil the kettle meditatively,

but tonight everything was shaken loose—
we lurched and scuttled in a dazzled haze,
fog rose from the startled asphalt, and

millions of dizzied baubles rattled down,
a wild rush of iced rain, globes like golf
balls or styrofoam meteors clattered down

stairs, shored up against embankments,
tucked into crevices, ripped poinciana leaves
down in a palpable frenzy. Go home, I thought.

Leave, leave, so I’m free to prowl again
the white noiseless streets, to shiver with
the crazed possums leaping along power

lines, to be alone with my cold, with
this religion of frozen things.

poem by S.J. Holland-Batt

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