Australian Love Poems 2013 edited by Mark Tredinnick will be published in July this year.
We are looking for poems that explore all aspects of love: the dark and the light of it; the holy mess of it; the beginning and the end; the ferocity and tenderness; the way it unmakes us, as we make it; the emptiness it leaves when it leaves.
I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him in the shrinking of the tide.
—Edna St Vincent Millay
Love is apart from all things, writes Jack Gilbert; it lays hold of everything we know.
There are many species of love, but it is ‘amatory love’ (as Octavio Paz puts it) we’re most interested in here. We want poems of eros and phillia, desire and devotion and longing and loss—love of the Dido and Aeneas kind; the love Neruda sang; the sort of thing John Donne never stopped exploring; the territory Leonard Cohen never stops walking; the bittersweet, remorseless affection Sappho and Catullus wrote; the love Auden mourns when he wishes the clocks would stop; the oceanic but plainer-sailing kind of affair Emily Dickinson imagined:
Wild nights—Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
our luxury
Love stays, sometimes; love grows old; and we’re interested in love like that, too. Love that flares and burns and dies; love that is kind—or complicated—and long.
If you have a poem you’d like considered for this publication click here for submission guidelines.
