Lit-Mag #36

“Home & Homecoming”


David Cahill took this photo of Tatjana in 2007, one year before she died of cancer

Looking for a place where he will be more at home, Rilke wrote from Rome in 1903: ‘No, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere’. It seems that a poet’s home is hardly ever here and now. Homecoming is often a return to a childhood and youth, or a search for a place which makes us feel as we are at home. I hope you will enjoy these returns and searches of our contributors in our homecoming issue as much as I did. – Tatjana Lukic, 1959 – 2008, Canberra


MTC Cronin lives in Maleny, Queensland, Australia. Published widely across the continents. Since 1995 she published thirteen collections of poetry, including some translated into Italian, Spanish and Macedonian. Her collection ‘more or less than’ 1-100 recently won the CJ Dennis Prize, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. ‘The Flower, the Thing’, forthcoming with University of Queensland Press in early 2006. Her contribution is entitled: A million years of patience and dust.

John Leonard was born in the UK in 1965 and came to Australia in 1991. He currently lives and works in Canberra, and is poetry editor of Overland. His poetry asks the question: Was it somewhere else?

Jennifer Compton (Wingello, NSW, Australia). Born in New Zealand, migrated to Australia in the early seventies. A playwright and a poet, publishes widely across the continents. Her most recent book of poetry was Parker & Quink (2004) and most recent stage play was The Big Picture. She will be the Whiting Fellow in Rome in 2006: I live here too.

Egon Tenert (Graz, Austria) teaches German as a foreign language, does ‘all sorts of translation work from English’ and is interested in Japanese culture: Haiku (bilingual) is the humble name of his submission.

Horst Lothar Renner (Vienna, Austria), a playwright and poet, with a long record of published and performed work, going back to the 60s: wie eh und je… innsbruck – eine reminiszenz (a poem in the German language)

Walter W. Hölbling (Graz, Austria) grew up on the Styrian side of the Semmering and studied in Graz, where he is currently chairing the Department of American Studies at Karl-Franzens-University. Research, lectures, and poetry readings have taken him to a good number of places in the USA and Europe. His poetry in English and German has appeared on-line and in print. Together with Gabriele Pötscher he published Love Lust Loss (2003), a volume of poetry with a ‘he says – she says’-structure. Another joint volume, Think Twice, will come out in the foreseeable future. Here he is wondering how to resume.

Nikola Madzirov (Strumica, Macedonia), an award winning Macedonian poet, published widely and translated into many languages. In 2005 he was writer-in-residence in Vienna, under a scholarship for the authors from Central and Eastern Europe. He also won scholarship of LiteraturHaus NÖ from Krems, Austria, and he will stay and work there in January 2006. They return three times sadder (English and German)

Halvard Johnson (New York City, USA), a poet, writer/teacher with rich traveling experience and memories from many parts of the world. After years spent abroad and across the USA, he returned to NY and now lives just a short walk from the apartment house he lived in as a boy: Homecoming.

Lawrence Upton, based in Cornwall (UK), has been making poetry for over four decades; and is prolific in a variety of genres. His book Wire Sculptures (Reality Street) came out from Reality Street in 2003; and Pictures, Cartoon Strips is due in 2006. His multimedia work, in collaboration with composer John Drever, was premiered in London in October 2005: 4 poems.

Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers, translator: Six poems from Balkan homes (Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro)

Ferida Durakovic (Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina) is one of the leading contemporary Bosnian poets. Her poetry has been awarded and translated into many languages. This is a prose piece: Too much sadness and too little hair (translated from Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth)

S.K. Kelen (Canberra, Australia): Coming Home was written at the tender age of sixteen, and was one of S.K. Kelen’s first published poems (first published in Poetry Australia back in 1973 and later in his first collection To the Heart of the World’s Electricity). ‘Coming Home’ might be seen as a rough template for later poetic journeys. S.K. Kelen’s most recent book is Goddess of Mercy (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002). A new book of poems will be appearing in 2006.

Stephen Mead (Albany, USA) is a published artist/writer. ‘I am submitting to you an excerpt from a piece entitled: A Thousand Beautiful Things (a life in two hallways and four small rooms)’.

Anant Kumar (Kassel, Germany) was born in the North Eastern Indian State Bihar. He had learnt German as a Foreign Language in New Delhi, before he came to Germany in 1991 to study German literature and linguistics. Since 1997 he has published eight books of poetry and prose in German, and received several awards for his writing. Islands are places far from land (translator: Marilya Veteto Reese)

Nenad Bracic (Belgrade, Serbia), studied at School of Applied Arts in Sarajevo and the Accademia di Belle Arti Brera in Milan, and since the 80s has exhibited frequently across Europe. Frescoes painting and restorations, photography and sculpture are some of his main interests, as well as ‘a yearning for the romantic period of archaeology’. The Story of the Kremzar Excavation Site started in 1988 with its first exhibition in the Gallery SKC, Belgrade. It continues…


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