Johanna's BlogJudith Bishop
b. 1972, Australia
Judith Bishop is a poet, amateur translator and professional linguist. Her first poetry collection, Event (Salt Publishing, 2007), won the Anne Elder award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Awards C.J. Dennis Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the ASAL Mary Gilmore Prize. Her other awards include the Australian Book Review Poetry prize (2006) and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2002-2004). Her poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poems 2006, 2007 and 2008 and The Best Australian Poetry 2006 and 2007. Her translations from French (Philippe Jaccottet, Gérard Macé) have been published in journals in Australia and overseas. She lives in Sydney with her husband and young daughter.
Judith was commissioned as part of The Red Room Company's Dust Poems project, drawing on her childhood recollections of growing up on the then-border between rural Gippsland and suburbia. She remembers the long grass paddocks in front of her house and the sweetish smell that used to drift by from the livestock feed factory located near the town centre. Read her poem below.
Freight and flight
Dawn heat, tarred sky
pink-striped on the horizon
beyond the lights of Darwin and the coast.
My rig sails into this air as though
weightless, two cars tall,
like a low-flying plane, skimming
the highway at the leaf-height
of the woollybutt,
dust clouds streaming,
gauges twitching to the forces
gently carrying me seated
like a gull wafted by a thunderstorm.
Driving this B-double, I’m as lusty
as Apollo, when he hitched his shining chariot,
the sun:
all the dazzlement
of power
focused in the steering column,
fierce stars arrowing
from the polished bull bar,
and a load that could crush me
a hundred times over –
but follows me
docile as a cloud.
