Category: Blackwood, Mary

Robert Dessaix, launching ‘THE DEAR FOUR’

(From Robert Dessaix’s speech to launch THE DEAR FOUR, poetry by Mary Blackwood, Christiane Conésa-Bostock, Karen Knight and Liz McQuilkin – Hobart 14th December 2025)

I feel (in this year of Donald Trump, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza) as if something has withered inside me. Something that’s always been there, isn’t there any more. There’s an emptiness. (And not the Buddhist sort.) I feel a sort of grief. Who doesn’t. Something vital I once had a grasp of has disappeared. Am I mildly demented? Have I misplaced something? What is it? (At my age, after all, you misplace things all the time: books, letters, your spectacles, people …) Please don’t let me lose my mind, pleads a night-time voice in Liz McQuilkin’s first poem in the collection … but she, with her squirrel psyche, has a store of poems to nourish her spirit.

This collection, The Dear Four (an eccentric title, too, arresting – Who’d have guessed what ‘dear’ means without being told?) The Dear Four gives me confidence, nevertheless, even without a store of poems, if I pay attention, I can find what’s been missing. I am enlivened by it – inspirited, we once said. (If only things were as they used to be …) Not every poem in the book will mend the wound – my particular wounds … how could it? But a surprising number make me feel whole. To my surprise. To my delight. (I don’t normally listen to what poets say, remember. The distillation I find in poetry is usually too radical for me.) Yet overwhelmingly these poems made me sing. One by one they made me take flight.

(More at https://walleahpress.com.au/launch-the-dear-four.html)

Robert Dessaix to launch ‘The Dear Four’: Hobart

 

TheDearFour-launch-invitation

An invitation to attend the launch by Robert Dessaix of the poetry collection ‘The Dear Four’, featuring new poems by Mary Blackwood, Christiane Conésa-Bostock, Karen Knight and Liz McQuilkin

Sunday 14th December 2.30pm

Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay, Hobart

Drinks available from the bar

RSVP: lizmcquilk@gmail.com by 30th November

Mary Blackwood — book launch, Hobart: 22nd June

A little over thirty years ago, I sat down and interviewed poet and children’s writer Mary Blackwood in Hobart. To my dismay, the recording failed, necessitating a return visit to re-record our conversation, though Mary kindly says that part of the experience doesn’t figure in her recollections. In her conversation, she spoke of being a writer in Tasmania, also mentioning her grandmother — Agnes M. Morris — a poet too … and a couple of her Agnes’s poems appeared on the website alongside the interview.
 
   In May at a poetry reading in Oatlands, I sat down again with Mary and admired her poetry collection Small Cosmos (Ginnindera Press), her first. ‘I’m a somewhat slow writer,’ she observed, ‘I was probably only averaging a poem or two a year’.
‘Life gets in the way,’ I suggested.
‘Yes!’
   
     Gathering a lifetime’s poems into a book invariably means it has more to offer than interrogations of school and early adult experiences; sorrow and loss ineviteably intrude. But wry humour’s in evidence too in her words — the poem ‘At Your Age’, the lines …
 
     The physiotherapist tells you
     there are three things the matter
     with your foot
     all of which can be expected
     At Your Age
 
     I wrote to Mary, sharing my own experience of ‘At Your Age’: the first time a teenager stood to offer me his seat on a bus. The discombobulation, not being sure whether to laugh or cry…. She says she could write a variation of that poem ‘pretty much every week’.
 
     
Mary Blackwood’s <em>Small Cosmos</em> will be launched by Karen Knight and Liz McQuilkin on Wednesday 22nd June at 3 p.m. at the Royal Yacht Club, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay.
     
   

Fullers Poets — Mary Blackwood & Liz McQuilkin: 12th May (Hobart)

Fullers Poets is a new event series celebrating contemporary poetry. The first event in this series will feature poets Liz McQuilkin (Unwrapping Clouds) and Mary Blackwood (Small Cosmos) in conversation, with readings from their work.

Praise for Liz McQuilkin:
‘Liz McQuilkin has Mary Oliver’s ability to show us ordinary, yet extraordinary, moments in the natural and human worlds. I love her sharing of reflective moments, and her pellucid, deeply moving observations on births, deaths, and the journeying between.’ – Esther Ottaway

Praise for Mary Blackwood:
‘Mary Blackwood writes with power and precision. She takes a razor to the times in which we live, slicing away the dross and the cant. She gifts us poetry that is deft, sure, laden with insight. If a poet’s task is one of linguistic distillation, a paring down to lay bare the diamantine essence of things, then here is a poet of the very first order. Read these poems – see what language can do.’ – Pete Hay