Poem | Stuart Barnes - Overland literary journal

254 Autumn 2024

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Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.

Kindness and the mask of kindness are the same:

a kindly man, with blue
irony and kindness. Ashbery days
with the wrong kinds of changes

a kind of translucence
              a      kind      of      moon

The city is a kind of hospice. 
The people are hard-eyed, kindly, with nothing inside them, 

Each message is a kind of poem, 

   Thought is all sadness; but night is all kindness: the stars are on high.

What kind of father are you
    Why do I turn from the honey of life to the blood-kindling wine?

What kind of creature
What kind of weather is risk?

‘from Nonets’ is a cento from MTC Cronin’s ‘LXIV [Your faded clothes flutter like a flag]’, David Malouf’s ‘Epitaph for a Monster of Our Times’, Robert Adamson’s ‘The Flow-Through’, Lee Cataldi’s ‘the simple past’, Jill Jones’ ‘Edge/Past’, joanne burns’ ‘[at 8 a.m.]’, Geoff Page’s ‘The Hospice’, James McAuley’s ‘Envoi’, Geoff Page’s ‘The Lonely Phone’, J Brunton Stephens’ ‘Convict Once’, John Kinsella’s ‘Circus’, Dorothy Porter’s ‘Cold (1)’, Philip Salom’s ‘Two Kinds of Weather’