Johanna's BlogLachlan Brown
Lachlan Brown is recently completed his PhD thesis on the poetry and prose of Kevin Hart at the University of Sydney. He lives in southwest Sydney and is a part-time teacher at William Carey Christian School. Some of Lachlan's poems have appeared in Southerly, Heat, Hermes and Philament. He has won the University of Sydney Union poetry prize and the Henry Lawson Poetry prize. In 2008 Lachlan won a Marten Travelling Bequest for poetry. He plans to use this bequest to visit Paris, studying the 2005 riots and their links to similar incidents in Sydney.
Lachlan's poetry featured in Nightwriting, 2008. He will also work with Macquarie Feilds High School as part of the Papercuts program for 2009 and again in 2010.
Evensong
O to be back in the southwest at dusk,
beneath the red streaks that sometimes
line the sky with spray tan enthusiasm.
This is the day worn thin,
marked by the wind's sudden realisations
(trees are a nation state, a beard is horizontal).
Don't you know that winter means
passing houses during the family meal,
each hallway bathed in a television's blue?
Don't you know that we must live in the shadows
of great financial institutions?
But this pinstriped night
where stars bleed into city lights,
where planes could be skywriting
the evening sky somehow,
where each constellation scaffolds the canopy,
allowing the universe to find its breath
in imperious and strange relations.
