Month: March 2015

Credit note: “Folds” was published in The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, which I co-edited with P. S. Cottier (IP, 2014), and is reproduced by permission of the poet. The Stars Like Sand is available from the publisher and from amazon.com.au. If you’re ordering through a bookshop that doesn’t stock it, let them know the ISBN: 978-1-922120-78-6

Check out this excellent review of The Stars Like Sand in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Tim says: This is another of the fine poems we selected for The Stars Like Sand, and that would be quite enough reason to post it here, but there’s another one: partly inspired by her inclusion in The Stars Like Sand and the quality of the anthology, Jo Mills decided to set up an international speculative poetry competition with very generous prizes. It’s open for submissions now, and closes on 1 May. Check out the guidelines here:

https://interstellaraward.wordpress.com/interstellar-award-for-speculative-poetry/

About Jo Mills: Jo Mills is a speculative poet, short story writer and fantasy author (under the pen-name Joanna Fay). She recently founded Interstellar to host two annual awards for speculative poetry and fiction respectively, and to publish themed speculative fiction and poetry anthologies from 2016.

Jo lives in the Perth Hills, Western Australia, with her teenage son, two dwarf rabbits and a quail who thinks she’s an eagle. She keeps an eye on the sky for starships and patiently awaits the arrival of her galactic family. Jo’s author website can be found at http://joannafay.me/

The Hub Tuesday Poem: is Nest by Linda France, chosen by Helen McKinlay.

Between jobs, Jim
drifts through signings,
conventions. His agent calls.
There’s a thing with werewolves,
a guest slot on “The Walking Dead”,
but no sign of the fifty million
he needs to film Macbeth.

Playing the old Bill
has kept him in threads, in fags,
but Macbeth will take serious wedge.
It’s enough to grey his hair,
drag his cheekbones down.
He smiles and signs. His agent calls
about a thing with ghouls.

Tim says: I’m writing a batch of new poems at the moment, but am not posting them here yet as I’m looking to submit them to magazines – and my published books have been mined for Tuesday Poems to the brink of severe resource depletion! So, when looking for something unpublished to post, I was glad to stumble over Jim, the actor always waiting for a callback, for a call. For the record, the reference to “The Walking Dead” was once a reference to “Smallville”. Jim’s been waiting for a while.

The Tuesday Poem: This week’s Tuesday Poem is New Margins by Joan Fleming, selected by Helen Rickerby.

Tim Jones is a Wellington author, poet and editor. His latest book is anthology The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (2014), which he co-edited with P.S. Cottier. Find out more at http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.co.nz/

This year, Helen Lowe has refeatured four of my poems on her excellent blog – that is, she’s re-posted four of my poems that she has previously featured on my blog as Tuesday Poems. Here they are:

The First Artist On Mars

Thinning

The stars, Natasha

Angela Carter

Thanks, Helen!

New International Spec Fic Poetry Competition

I’ve recently found out about a major new international competition for speculative poetry, now open for entries (deadline 1 May): https://interstellaraward.wordpress.com/interstellar-award-for-speculative-poetry/

What’s particularly cool is that this competition was partly inspired by the anthology I co-edited with P.S. Cottier, The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry – which gets a nice mention on its “About” page: https://interstellaraward.wordpress.com/about/ – and that it is judged by Jo Mills, one of the contributors to The Stars Like Sand.

(For Tim)

Riverton Beach? I was there once
for a family reunion,
stood on algae-skinned rock

facing the sea, and thought
I was a child playing
by the cool water, sun-tanned

glassy-eyed, out with the family,
though it wasn’t me
that was playing there,

just my father – part of
my history, but, later,
I stood there too, and nowhere

did we skim stones…
My father was older now,
with son-in-tow. Me, learning

the far fragments of past,
feeling his years grow colder,
memory passing like a falling star.

Credit note: “Riverton Beach Poem” is published in Mark Pirie’s chapbook Poems For My Father (The Night Press, 2014), and is available from the publisher for $15.00.

Tim says: I enjoyed Mark’s chapbook very much, and it was an unexpected and very pleasant bonus to be reminded of this fine poem … and its dedication to me! If I recall correctly, Mark wrote “Riverton Beach Poem” in response to my poem “Stones”, which appeared in my first collection Boat People. Here it is:

The Tuesday Poem: This week, it’s A lyrebird by Michael Farrell, from Best Australian Poems 2014.