I don’t know if I can tell you the truth.What if truth were prismatic—everyone looking through fruit-coloured panes?
Ordinary Time
In late 2019, during what would become, for many people, the last few months of ordinary time as we knew it, a correspondence began between two strangers, via email and the narrow medium of the Messenger pane, and unfolded, one poem at a time.
Without so much as the germ of a plan in place, the exchange evolved into an intense collaboration which ultimately became Ordinary Time. Whether courtship dance, blood-brotherhood, or epistolary love affair of the imagination, the reader can decide.
Most extraordinary of all was how this conversation played out in a realm known only to two poets who, at the time of this book going to print, have never met, at least not in the usual definitions of time, space, and light.
Where would you go first, my friend,when the apparatus glowswith banks of tiny lightsand hums like the Aurora?Back in time or forward? Novel world or old?
I’d return to where you werethe day I passed, disguised as egret,loon or puffin,with the roofing nailsof sand eels looping from my beak.
Ordinary Time is published by Pitt Street Poetry and is available in poetry-loving bookshops around Australia and online.
Launch event
Ordinary Time was launched by acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge at a special in-person event on 18th August 2022 at The Royal Oak, Balmain. You can watch the launch recording on YouTube.
Praise for Ordinary Time
In Ordinary Time, two poets explore what it means to take on ‘the shape of curiosity’, the ‘prismatic’ truth of things. Then they allow us to eavesdrop.
Delightful. Written in a form that evokes unsteady pillars but also the sudden sight of a murmuration, these poems range far but always bring us home.’
– Helen Mort, author of The Illustrated Woman (Chatto & Windus, 2022, shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection)
Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy’s collaborative work Ordinary Time, is a remarkable confluence of imaginations that takes the reader into a hallucinatory search for self and home. The book is more than just the sum of alternating poems: it’s a poetic bond of unforgettable power.’
– Judith Beveridge, author of Sun Music (Giramondo, 2018) writing in the Australian Book Review: Books of the Year 2022
The precise nature of the exchange that builds in Ordinary Time is hard to define. It is playful and deadly serious, a dialogue of two professional practitioners of poetry, one that is also intensely personal.’
– Rose Lucas, author of Increments of the Everyday (Puncher and Wattmann, 2022). Extract from review in the Australian Book Review
Though the topics touched on range widely, the poems [in Ordinary Time] tend to generate a composite poetic personality, somewhat reminiscent of the chameleonic Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. The result certainly upsets easy preconceptions about “male” and “female” writing – and, for that matter, established conceptions of the poets’ previous work. There is a loose narrative to do with time-travel but mainly Ordinary Time is lyrical poetry freed from its “normal” expectations and limitations.’
– Geoff Page, author of 101 Poems 2011-2021 (Pitt Street Poetry, 2022). Extract from review in the Canberra Times: Are we still in Australian poetry’s ‘golden age’?
Time travelling is what poets do. They take in what is past, or passing, or to come, as Yeats had it. These two poets embark on fantasy-driven voyages, prompting in each other both similarities and differences of memory and experience, especially when their imaginary Time Machine lands. They enrich each other with their recollections and fancies and their often amazing imagery:
There are fig birds with blown ember for eyesthat take biopsiesfrom fruit, early in the season.’
– Nigel Jarrett, author of Miners at the Quarry Pool (Parthian, 2013). Extract from review in the Acumen, Issue 106.
Ordinary Time is not an ordinary book.
– Dr Beatriz Copello, author of Under the Gums’ Long Shade (Bemac, 2008). Extract from review in Compulsive Reader.
If you would like a review copy of Ordinary Time, please contact the publisher at: psp [at] pittstreetpoetry [dot] com