ISSUE FIVE
November 1998

Peter Minter

Peter Minter Peter Minter is a contributing editor to Boxkite, an international journal of poetry and poetics, and was founding editor of both the Varuna New Poetry Series and Cordite: Poetry and Poetics Review.  His chapbook Monocausotaxophilia will soon be published through Churchill College, Cambridge, and his second collection, Empty Texas, is due for publication in 1999 with Paper Bark Press.  He lives in Sydney and lectures at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. 
1973 Liver    Read Along with the Author


Reminded him so much
of an injured animal, teeth ground down on a bad trip —
Les statuettes et figurines,
des proportions tres modestes
et parfois infimes — not bad at all
really,

just it was summer then
the decade The Olgas looked sooner than the elegiac majesty
of Tao to shave off another second in the wheat field

& give her the fugitive,
monologic translated here as
metabolism
drifts from the throat,
becomes lobster, metastases
perfecting
the page.

 

 

1977 Gravity    Read Along with the Author


I can think only
two wheels taking the forthright jump
into parallel
to Come Up Here! accustomed to corners,
that urban smell of wish and self-pity
almost glamorous as he dances to the radio,
not touching water since her hands,
unwelcome, such small senses of existence
or the knowledge of consequences, maximatosis and rhyme

her astonished narcotic delay, her thick coriolus
and what makes it here
bend in the flow

curving back then to that apple
lying on the lawn
your lover's voice
setting out the few tree, foots and ranches, the dead water
& know explanation
pressing the earth
so
stand outside AND eat it like an apple
rise off of reality,
certain details who land back the future
insulated by spirit
and flesh,
her theory of excess.

 

 

1981 Reverses    Read Along with the Author


Everything else tripped to go
so you hung onto words like edge,
remarkable, mouth
& fire, to film those oncological
surrounds
About Power
emerge from another body, too spread
eagled at 3:00am
to walk, get over that history, the
best mind's
latest feats of espionage & clarity,
perforce,
anonymity and condensation, the system
heap askew with conjunctions

or, imagined nicely, your red
pastourelle reconstitutes virtue, the
Tempest
and all that futile glamour
surging over paddocks
gently wrecks the poppies
atonal and clean, the wind-up gorging
on fever
beside his' and hers' luminescences, she
told me
the directive for passing over
conduits of pardelotes, turf juxta
prosed underfoot.

 

 

1982 Reputation     Read Along with the Author


Look, you would say, how the sky falls
perhaps, a million times ask the
phosphorescent distance of
Those Things,
what you have experienced
never getting started, exhaustively inclined
towards 'costs'
you carry with you now
Prescented Imagery and
laughter, imperfect
design & production spared by
the comedy — Witz ist ein Blitz!
healthy breasts bounce
on your Italian leather sofa!

Well, we'll have your Cake and give it
two angles, when she said
I want the Vogue shot first, then
the Style plate —
all those People! think
of Us
Turkey de la Wig — 'Poetry and
Dessicated Egos'
vanishing in series
of Scratch and Smell editorials!


OK, love isn't with it, just isn't true, or so
you're meant to say, credibility
boiling like a Blacktown Pro
under the collar
& steaming up the City on the hill
with the bliss
of waking at 5:00am

& wanking to visions of barmaids,
lists of Good Domestic Flagellation
stuck to the new fridge wall.

 

 

Peter Minter: Poetry
Copyright � 1999 The Cortland Review Issue FiveThe Cortland Review