When Figs Fly – Available Now!

Close-Up Books is proud to announce the release of poetry collection When Figs Fly by Jane Downing!

 

The collection is available in both ebook and print editions (by clicking on the image) and you can sample several poems beneath the blurb:

Australian poet Jane Downing‘s When Figs Fly reveals life in Australia and beyond with a keen eye for poignant details that linger, deftly capturing the beauty of the natural world, the bittersweetness of childhood and memory and exploring the all-too familiar foibles of human nature.

 

Local Positioning System

This corner is where the gutter backs up and the road floods.
It is dry now and everyone will forget until it rains again.

Keep going, up past where kittens popped out of the drain once, summer
balls of fur and eyes, in front of the house where the piano teacher lived;

she said ‘you have the hands of a flautist,’ so my piano lessons didn’t go far.
This line of trees was lopped around when I was in high school,

see how the branches have been cut to make a canyon for the power lines
to pass through. It’s all built up now: No. 32 is on the spot of the Paddock of One Sheep.

They’ve put a second storey on No. 29 and the hedge around No. 26
used to seem like something from a fairytale; things are taller when you are littler.

Turn right at the corner with the apartments. There was a girl who learned the violin,
she lived in the one on the lower left. Mostly windows are blind eyes but at dusk

she’d put the light on, stage lighting her bowing. Exhibitionist. Maybe I was smarting
from my piano teacher’s words, but I see her ghost in the window every time I pass.

It’s a long straight road next. In summer it is the best way to town because of the plane trees
The temperature drops 10 degrees instantly. And in autumn it rains itchy fluff

with the cockatoos up there ravaging the seed balls. No, that’s not a cockatoo.
It’s a scrap of paper in the wind.

Trick Photography

They say these are the days
you’ll remember forever
But you take photos anyway

Then the face in the mirror of the memory
Is not the one in the frame

You are not the little girl
behind the heat haze of cake and candles
You are behind the garage mortified
at finding not one minty in the hunt

But you point the camera at your child anyway
determined to capture a trick of the light
She smiles behind her own singing candles
And you wonder where the memory hides

 

Detention Deficit Disorder

How do you write a poem about Manus and Nauru
We’ve seen the razor wire footage/ listened to the reports
succumbed to Attention Deficit Disorder – look a celebrity died
Will a well chosen image connect
Move someone to action (not me)
like poetry in the old days recited in the heat of revolution
Does this need a personal anecdote
to give it a punch above lecture/harangue
a poignant quote*
A crisis point to bring into focus the human face
that reveals the inhumanity of our country of the Fair Go
turning a willfully blind eye
and blaming the hypocrisy of smiling politicians
Will a reference to Hitler help any (no)
How could the Germans not have known?
It’s not as if we don’t

History will not be kind
An Apology will be too late
Having written a poem will not have been enough

* ‘Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.’ Robert Frost