James Charlton

James Charlton Poems

James Charlton Biography

James Charlton is an Australian poet and writer in the area of interfaith and interreligious studies. Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1947, Charlton has lived mostly in Tasmania. He completed a MA at the University of Cambridge and a PhD at the University of Tasmania. Poetry editor of the Australian literary quarterly Island from 2002 to 2008, he delivered the inaugural Gwen Harwood Memorial Lecture in 2008. Works Charlton's Luminous Bodies was published in 2001 by Montpelier Press and tied for second place for the 2002 Anne Elder Award. So Much Light was published in 2007 by Pardalote Press. Numerous poems of his have been published in anthologies, in literary journals (Australian, American and British) and in newspapers. Various poems have been broadcast. "Transgressive Saints", shortlisted for the 2006 Broadway Poetry Prize, was published in The Broadway Poetry Prize Winners 2006 by Picaro Press. "Letter to Walt Whitman re: Iraq" was published in The Best Australian Poems 2006 by Black Inc. Charlton's study of three European mystical poet-theologians is due from Continuum Publishers in late 2012.)

The Best Poem Of James Charlton

Truganini’s Soliloquy

I have known Earth’s texture
like another skin.
All my life I have seen
the unseen entities. Each one
reflects a light beyond colour,
a light which paints
all colour into being.

When I was young, a white man
came to my shelter.
He’d heard the night-chorus,
but complained he couldn’t sleep,
having failed to hear the song behind the noise.
And when the new-created light
quivered through the slattings,
and shoals of eucalypt leaves
waved their shadows over us,
he wanted blinds, curtains.

I think he only saw Earth’s foreground -
his eyes roving for quarry.


The white men broke our circle,
which stretched outwards, like the sky’s vastness.
Their leaders thought we needed to be overseen.
If I’d known their words, I would’ve said:


You have lost the all-embracing song
which nurtures the past
into the future. You have failed
to see the All-Encompasser:
One who inhabits the wind,
without being it; One who dwells
within the cutting grass, but isn’t botanical.


The overseeing continues.
Pink heath is burnt; blackwoods cut down.
This is how the white man makes a garden.
Someone has planted ‘hydrangeas’
in front of where I live,
saying: ‘If the sun gets hot,
please cover them with an old sack.’

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