Kate Fagan

Kate Fagan Poems

Kate Fagan Biography

Kate Fagan was born in 1973 and is a poet, editor and songwriter whose books include The Long Moment (Salt),Thought’s Kilometre (Tolling Elves), return to a new physics (Vagabond) and First Light (Giramondo) in 2012. She is a former editor of the US-based journal How2and stems from one of Australia’s preeminent folk music families, the Fagans. Her album Diamond Wheel won the National Folk Recording Award of the National Film and Sound Archive in 2006. She currently lectures in literary studies at the University of Western Sydney.)

The Best Poem Of Kate Fagan

Authentic Nature

A long shadow passes
over the garden. Yesterday
I buried the bones, feathers and skulls
of two magpies fallen
from a nest during storms,

each bundle like coal,
a plain music of repair.
Something about the gesture
troubles me. Authenticity
comes at a price it seems -

neo-con cons make truth a panacea
for ego while nature becomes
a cipher for speak-easy
consumption tactics.
When Celan met Heidegger

a silent forest began to grow,
apprehension flowering between
the mortal business of politics
and a star above the well.
Those who talk of genius

are those who most suspect it.
Some kind of transplanted integrity
has taken place, the words
and rhymes of older empires
fraying under eucalypts

and fruitless in a country
such as this. Here I dig
for a different language,
a new balm for the bruise
of lost opportunities

and a way to resolve a parallax
even as I recite the lessons
of an unlevelled meeting -
arnica, eyebright,
the obvious humidity.

Kate Fagan Comments