Portraits & Dreamscapes
Join Izzy Roberts-Orr, author of ‘Raw Salt’, as she movingly explores contemporary elegy and lineages, alongside Manisha Anjali who invites us into the visions and awakenings of her Indo-Fijian ancestors from the sugar plantations of ‘Naag Mountain’. Peter Bakowski uncovers real and fictious characters through delightfully sharp portraiture, as he reads from his collection ‘Our Ways on Earth’. And enter the surreal, heart wrenching dreams and rural landscapes of Robbie Coburn’s ‘Ghost Poetry’.
Poets: Manisha Anjali, Robbie Coburn, Izzy Roberts-Orr & Peter Bakowski. MC: Amanda Anastasi.
Image by Dmitry Laudin
Poetica Dec 2024 will also be livestreamed on Tuesday, Dec 10, 8pm. Livestream playback will be available for 72 hours after the show.
Izzy Roberts-Orr is a poet and arts worker based on Wurundjeri Country in regional Victoria. Her debut collection, Raw Salt (Vagabond, 2024) was the recipient of a Marten Bequest Scholarship, Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship and longlisted for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is Creative Producer for Red Room Poetry.
2024 represents Peter Bakowski’s 42nd year of writing poetry. As a poet he remains influenced by the following quotes: “Use ordinary words to say extraordinary things” – Arthur Schopenhauer. “Make your next poem different from your last” – Robert Frost. “Give yourself a dollar for every word you can get rid of.” – David Lumsden.
Manisha Anjali is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024). She is the founder of Neptune, a research and documentation platform for dreams, visions and hallucinations. Manisha was a recipient of BLINDSIDE’s Regional Arts & Research Residency at Mooramong, a Writer-in-Residence at Incendium Radical Library and a Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre.
Robbie Coburn’s poetry collections include Ghost Poetry (Upswell, 2024), And I Could Not Have Hurt You (2023), and The Other Flesh (2019). His verse novel, The Foal in the Wire, will be published by Hachette Australia in 2025. He has been called ‘one of Australia’s most essential poets’ by ArtsHub, with his poems appearing in Poetry, Meanjin, Island and Westerly.
Access Information:
Visual rating 50%: Events are partly subtitled or include dialogue, background music and/or sounds, so d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences can have some engagement with the event.
Aural Rating 100%: Entirely sound-based with no visual elements and can be fully experienced by blind or low vision audiences.