With poetry as the drug, it was flashforward and flashback time at Riverbend Books on the 22nd of June with the launch of the 2010 Queensland Poetry Festival Programme and the CD A Million Bright Things,which stuffs into one little lunchbox sound-bites of some of the tastiest bits of the 2009 Queensland Poetry Festival.To launch A Million Bright Things festival committee members each took to the stage with a selection from this tough and tender train ride of an anthology. It's not just a word ride. The way each poet leans into their voice takes it above that. Music also has a thing or two to say.
There's acapella and accompanied - Jayne Fenton Keane zig-zags through a split jazz vocalese in A Jazz Poem for Miles Davis - Bremen Town Musician saws the fiddle in a heart on high seas song/poem Sailor - Angela Costi makes plaintive vocal ascents from the fluttering gaze text of Grandmother Marouilla's Liturgy - Brianna Carpenter shimmers through a song of unrequited love: Jacqueline - Rob Morris, Shiesh Money and Graham Nunn chug out the grungy partying of Vegemite - Hinemoana Baker & Christine White rise in a bluesy bilingual invocation to shoot from the heart, Talk You Up - and Neil Murray travels through a nostalgic narrative Anywhere Tonight.
Tough and tender meet in the bitter facts when Geoff Goodfellow reads Blue Sky Morning and Barbara Temperton tells us Purl. Tipping more toward the tender, laced with bitter-sweet Jeffrey Harpeng follows with Horse Tale in its reversible jacket mode as Horse Tail. The 'ah so right' continuity of this collection then runs fingers through your hair with quirky sensuality as Zenobia Frost indulges us in the warm indulgence of Bathing with Neil Gaiman.
For those who were at the 2009 festival this CD is a trip back in the Tardis, a chance to meet and re-baptise yourself in the public bathing place of phraseology. For those who weren't there, all you need to do is give it a few more listens and this divine deja vu will be with you also.
--------------------------------------------------------
As preview of the 2010 festival programme there was three guest performers. Darkwing Dubs rapped and rat a tat tatted on our frontal lobes, both left and right for remembering and imagining. Suzanne Jones juxtaposed the fragments of the splintered life. Then there was that diamond among these semi precious stones, Ynes Sanz put on a sequence of plays the size of poems. With lyrical necromancy she called up a collection of blokes and shielas (some still alive) to speak in their unique voices.
As a poker hand the evening was a royal flush. If you have ever felt that poetry events were risky bets, a couple of aces with perhaps a couple a threes, a five and a seven, then Riverbend will relieve that run of misfortune. Put your chips down and enjoy when the next one comes around. There's nobody here to shoot you for playing with a stacked deck.
.
