Meuse Press have just released an anthology of writing and photography from Broken Hill, a place where the sky touches the earth, where the rim of the world, if there were one, would seem to the eye only an armstrech away.
The anthology features poetry by David ‘Ghostboy’ Stavanger, Matt Hetherington, Les Wicks, Richard Tipping, Amelia Walker, Mike Ladd, David Brooks and many others. It celebrates the land, the people and their lives.
Images of roadkill
These creatures tonight/ breathing/ moonlight and dust (Roadkill, Teja Pribac)
and other wildlife
Corellas skirl in gumblossom,/ a drugged snake/ is scribbled in dust/ on the sun-tight plain (This Summer, Mark Miller)
leap out and whack the senses. We are shown intimate portraits of some places of significance;
Whole animals/ pile at the bottom/ of a man made ditch./ A stench you can taste/ glues breathing lungs to rib cage (broken hill landfill, Marvis Sofield)
we meet some of the locals;
The black man at the dinner table/ frowns at the cloth,/ searches his mind/ for the right ways to speak of it (The Ranger at Willandra, Jen Thompson)
and look deep into the shafts of lead and silver mines.
An eye of fire/ Lost in the cerulean haze/ Pounds the memory/ Of Maltese miners/ Groping in the depths/ Of the blasted earth (Upon Beds of Lead and Silver, James Waller)
The selected images range from the visceral to the historical and sit more than comfortably alongside the poems and short stories.
A shimmering snapshot of Broken Hill and it’s surrounding region that draws you in, searching for the finer detail.
