Eric Beach

Eric Beach Poems

Eric Beach Biography

Eric Beach, born 1947, is a New Zealand and Australian poet, playwright, and short story writer. Biography Born in New Zealand, Beach has lived in Tasmania and in Victoria since 1972. He is active in the Australian Performance Poetry scene, performing at workshops, readings and events around Australia. Eric Beach is one of Australia's most unusual and accessible poets. His work has been performed all over the country, at the Pram Factory and the Opera House, on trams and ferries, sung in jazz festivals, and writ large on billboards in railway stations. Eric is well-known as an Australian poet, playwright and community writer who currently lives in Victoria, but who has spent many years in Tasmania. He has been included in every anthology published by major literary magazines in Australia and has published five collections of poetry including 'Weeping for Lost Babylon' (Angus & Robertson, 1996), winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Age Poetry Book of the Year award. The back cover of that book contains praise from Dorothy Hewitt, Barrett Reid and Alan Wearne: 'Quirky, outrageous, heartbreaking. On and off the page, Eric Beach dances. He is a true original in a tragi-comic world.' - Dorothy Hewett 'A book which will, in time, become part of our common culture. Deeply responsive to particulars of place, people and time, Beach's poetry yet reaches far beyond this and speaks to women and men everywhere.' - Barrett Reid 'Utterly from the heart, almost too honest (though never mawkish), 'weeping for lost babylon', Eric Beach's ten-part elegy for his son... shows how, when it comes to bedrock emotions, nothing in the arts approaches poetry.' - Alan Wearne)

The Best Poem Of Eric Beach

Child Who Slipped Rope

upturned open-mouthed
in a ring
of sun
a flower
took you out
with an upper cut
a knot
turned its back
& you became a tie

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