Peter Bakowski

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Peter Bakowski Poems

The thin armour

you give the newborn,
...

When all the things you need to do
remain
all the things you need to do.
...

Either tortoises live long lives because they don’t hurry

or they don’t hurry because they live long lives.
...

Wen stares into the bathroom mirror,

touches lightly his graying hair,
...

5.

Some worry about going bald,
others go bald from worrying.
...

Although she’s mopping the kitchen floor,
Ella is crying.

Words come out of her husband’s mouth.
...

Your journey will be long,

dangers certain.
...

Two Japanese soldiers tied me to the lamppost with rope.

Their commanding officer had a small mole on his right cheek.
...

I’m in more than two minds about it.
...

Ten pages a day in longhand,

Verna’s new novel is going well.
...

You get a grip
when you
let go.
...

I will paint

my eroded mother,
...

Before you lecture a thirsty person,

give them water.
...

The river is brown-hued, wide.

In its shallows small black fish appear,
...

When a man grows a moustache,
his eyebrows want to hide in his ears.
...

Ever punctual I stride,
past doors of frosted glass and stencilled names,
the expected sounds of typing.
A morning nod to Mrs Flegg in reception,
...

When placing words

your way,
...

The cup of water
accepts
rain
the wind
a leaf leaving its mother.
...

You can rest

in the shade of a tree,
...

Peter Bakowski Biography

Peter Bakowski is an Australian poet. His poems often use deceptively simple words and images, reminiscent at times of words in a child's picture book, but with some stylistic similarities to the work of writers such as Charles Simic. or Vítězslav Nezval. Biography Born in Melbourne, to Polish-German immigrants. Bakowski was born premature, with a hole in the heart, he has survived two heart operations. His parents ran a delicatessen, and after completing his secondary schooling he worked in a series of low-paying jobs before opening his own record shop in the early 1980s. He commenced writing poetry while travelling through Texas in 1983. His early works, including his first book Thunder Road, Thunder Heart (1988), show the influence of American Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. His poems have appeared in over one hundred literary magazines worldwide, predominantly in English but also in Arabic, German, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and French. He has lived in Melbourne and London, and travelled widely throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Africa, occasionally as an artist-in-residence. In 2007 he became an artist in residence at the University of Macau. He has been writer-in-residence at the B.R. Whiting Library in Rome; the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris; the University of Macau; Soochow University, Jiangsu Province, China; the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Greenmount, Western Australia; the Hobart Writer’s Cottage in Battery Point, Tasmania; the Arthur Boyd Estate of “Bundanon” near Nowra, New South Wales; the Broken Hill Poetry Festival, New South Wales. His travels have provided a wide range of material for his work; his fifth collection Days That We Couldn’t Rehearse contains poems set in Paris, Transylvania, the Upper Volga, Uzbekistan and Sarajevo. Raised a Catholic, in 1994 he married Helen Bourke, an Irish-Australian seamstress. They live in Melbourne with their son Walter. His book In The Human Night won the 1996 Victorian Premier's Award, the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the same award, for his book Beneath Our Armour.)

The Best Poem Of Peter Bakowski

Portrait Of Blood

The thin armour

you give the newborn,

the midwife

washes away.



In playgrounds,

when the bullied fall,

you rush

to the hill of a bruise.



The shape of your engine room,

lovers carve into tree trunks.



In war

you blossom from

every wounded soldier and civilian.

In the field hospital

you glisten on

the gloved hands of surgeons

and each busy scalpel.



You’re not to be trusted,

rummaging in the attic of our skulls,

studying the blueprints of our veins,

deciding where to place

your quick assassins,

clot and haemorrhage.



I hold my breath,

check my pulse,

as you make your rounds.



(from Beneath Our Armour)

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