One River
I’m delighted to be able to announce my third book of poetry titled One River is now available to purchase online from Puncher & Wattmann. If you live in Newcastle or nearby you can also purchase a copy of One River from MacLeans Books in Beaumont Street Hamilton. I launched the collection Saturday 21st of October 2023 at the IF Maitland Indie Writers Festival and ArtFest. I was lucky enough to be joined by outstanding poet Dimitra Harvey, who interviewed me about the collection, its genesis and production. Paul MacNamara, renowned pianist played a series of tone poems he composed in response to one of the haibun - Ash Island. I read the poem with Paul accompanying me on a grand piano kindly made available at the venue Sun Street Studios, Maitland. You can find an edited video of the event here.
One River is a series of meditations written in response to the Hunter River and the streams and waterways that are its catchment. The poems are written in a Japanese form the haibun, in which passages of prose are punctuated by haiku. I’ve chosen the Korean sijo instead of haiku, while the sijo is, like the haiku brief, it’s a longer form which allowed me the room to make a more substantial lyric response to the birds, the trees and weather I encountered on the river. As I put it in the introduction to the collection—
…the sijo in their relative compression are analogous to a river rapids—or the quick-step that’s the banter of a brook—and on the other hand, the prose in its amplitude has more in common with the wider, calmer reaches of a stream.
One of the joys of writing this collection was giving myself permission to write an introduction and an epilogue; an opportunity to expand in essay form upon the nature of my experiences on the river and how they translated into poetry. Here is an excerpt from Beginnings (the title of the introduction)
I also harboured a notion that walking with the river would align with a perennial feeling I have, that the process of imagining and writing poetry itself takes the form of a river, one which belongs to the geography of my interior.
What’s Left, my second collection is one of the Flying Islands Pocket Poet Series.
“For me, Steve’s poetry attends to what Burnside describes as ‘a new science of belonging’ — one that, in his words, puts us 'back in the open’, seeks ‘to make us both vulnerable and wondrous again — to reconnect us’ with the earth. What’s Left is charged with that ecological imperative to dwell in and with the rest of the world in a new way.”
Dimitra Harvey from her launch speech for What’s Left.
Click image to purchase a copy of “What’s Left” from the publisher Flying Islands Poetry Community.
Broken Ground was released by University of Western Australia Publishing (UWA Publishing) in 2018.
Click on the image to purchase a copy from UWA Publishing.
Broken Ground - Endorsements
“Borrowing from the title of his Bruce Dawe prize-winning poem, Steve Armstrong’s wonderful first collection is ‘a cracked and weathered prayer’. These are questing, generous poems, filled with grace and vulnerability, and reading them is like taking a walk through a magical and yet familiar landscape, a walk haunted by memory, grief, longing and hope. Highly recommended.”
Lisa Brockwell
“The intimate territory Armstrong walks attends to the wider world—in particular, wild country, forest and field, river and ridge. But also the suburbs, the kitchen, the realms of the everyday. He writes the places in themselves, and he writes them as analogues, metaphors, for the geographies of the self. His is a poetry of landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss. Of delight and dilemma. He is a diviner. From the broken ground he draws the sacred.”
Mark Tredinnick
Audio - poet Maggie Ball of compulsivereader.com interviews Steve about Broken Ground. He reads some poems from the collection.