A significant area of growth across our last few months has centred around the release of a series of essays evaluating noteworthy examples of Australian poems which explore a sense of location.

Working with respect on Gunaikurnai country, down in West Gippsland, Victoria – having started with an appreciation of verse by Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, set in the higher latitudes of South Australia – our plan is to keep generating pieces of evaluative writing each month.

Even today, within Catchment News & View, I have already posted a new essay appraising parts of a long-running project, ‘Topography’, still being drafted with a keen eye on the lay of the land (both artistic & geographic) by a renowned veteran of Melbourne’s poetry world, Kris Hemensley.

In a follow-up to her close study of link-and-shift, as an element vital to Japanese-based poetry, Jo McInerney is preparing another essay, this time recognising the legacy left by a leading tanka poet.

Jo’s input has been great (as ever) in helping to select tanka to be published in this issue, with our editorial team again giving feedback aimed at helping to refine valuable work from a few writers.

This time around, I welcome Peter Roberts to our crew, as Poet-in-Residence for Hobson’s Bay, over in Altona/ Williamstown: he has taken on the co-editor’s role for longer poetry in this issue.

Readers may already have seen how Peter has recently written another of our evaluative pieces on poetry that focusses on senses of location, also accessible through Catchment News & Views.

So – since the release of Edition 3 – your editors within this journal have sought to follow advice from Kris Hemensley, to ‘bless/ exemplarity’ by showing appreciation for striking poems of place.

My deepest appreciation is extended to Jennifer Fell, who has made invaluable contributions here as a co-editor with longer poetry in previous editions.

Our IT team-members, Marlene & Mike Ogden, continue to bring energy & expertise too, crucial in facilitating this free online resource for you as readers.

Other members of the Bbaa, Sue Murphy, Heather Brimblecombe, Jeff Thege & Yvette Stubbs, also deserve thanks, for backing Catchment within the committee, in promotions & via Poetry Bauhaus.

Our gratitude likewise goes to the Australian Haiku Society, the Australian Writers Resource, the Victorian Writers Centre & Gippsland Writers – and still to Gregory Piko’s poetry website too – for continuing to offer postings/ emails that keep on encouraging submissions during each half-year.

Representing 70 Australian poets in delivering new creative work, rich in imagery, our editorial choices aim to pursue variety in location & perspective, with distinctive qualities of style & voice.

Naturally you will find writing which celebrates various locales, across this country & beyond, for their visual beauty, their wildlife, evoking places & creatures through appealing to the senses, with powers of observation acute; maybe plucking heart-strings with feelings of loss in loving & leaving.

At times this poetry reflects concerns about human issues & threats to the environment in specific localities, while at others it is warm in its recollections of fellow humanity; bound to an old home; an earlier time. Perhaps putting a quirky spin on local folklore, some writing might make you smile.

Other poems pay homage to literary precedents, owing debts to Aeschylus, Dante, Henry Lawson: whereas further links to cultural sources have also proven inspirational, within ekphrastic poetry of place, sparked by paintings from Australian artists Tom Roberts, Russell Drysdale & Vali Myers.

If your ear hearkens for heavier beats & louder rhymes, Catchment may not sing a song for you, yet we are proud to offer varied work, carefully crafted in free-verse by dedicated practitioners.

Approaches used extend as far as Post-Modernist versification by Kris Hemensley himself; along with a villanelle, as a Western poetic form made famous by Dylan Thomas in ‘Do Not Go Gentle…’

Glad to promote contrast too by hosting English Language work owing debts to Japanese culture, Catchment is unique in this country in publishing sequences of tanka, including 9 such extended explorations of location, alongside stand-alone examples of this verse-form, many full of heart.

Poets sharing their writing hail largely from Victoria & Western Australia, along with New South Wales & the Australian Capital Territory (as well as from Queensland, South Australia & Tasmania).

Readers will find Western poetry & tanka alike sparked by locations as magnetic yet distant as the Kimberley & Cape Leeuwin, at northern & southern extremes down the west side of our continent.

Throughout, you might consult your poetical GPS to pin-point a scatter of other Australian place-names, from Tuggerah Lake to Oodnadatta; Killarney Beach to Kilcunda; Alberton to Ulverston.

Some travellers’ odes have been prompted by journeys overseas, of course, from Udaipur to the Taj Mahal, at Arak; before skipping from India, to Colombo, in Sri Lanka; and then to Seminyak, in Bali; or focussing on the Ness of Brodgar, in Scotland; or a seed vault in Norway; along with the Dolomites, in Italy; as well as Central Park, in New York City.

With 11 poets having both longer poems & tanka selected, work in parallel has been inspired by locations across Japan, with some writers not using a verse-form derived from that country: we send postcards from trips made to Kanazawa & Ishikari Bay; from visiting the garden of a modern haiku-master, Shiki, in Matsuyama; from being a wanderer on a Shikoku temple pilgrimage.

As John Keats put it, ‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold’, experiencing ‘goodly states and kingdoms’, in reading Chapman’s translation of Homer’s epic poetry, again from Ancient Greece.

Edition 4 in our literary website might not stretch half as far as incorporating snapshots of ‘many western isles’, compared to eastern ones.

This fourth issue of Catchment may have you look back over a lifetime, though, touched by simple images of childhood, made poignant in evoking that one place, with its squeaky front gate, leading to a backyard, where many of us – like this journal itself – celebrated our own second birthdays.

Rodney Williams
Editor

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