Poet
Recipient of major national awards across the last four decades, Alan Wearne is now a major figure in Australian poetry.
Editor & Critic
The 1980s-90s saw Alan Wearne’s distinctive poetic voice in Poetry Reviews for Australia’s major newspapers and literary journals.
Publisher
Alan Wearne’s Grand Parade Poets published 14 volumes of Australian poetry including new poets as well as Selected Poems from more established poets.
Performances
Archived highlights of Alan Wearne’s performances reading his own works; being interviewed for radio; and appearing in podcasts and documentaries.
LATEST RELEASE
MIXED BUSINESS
A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre–World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne’s latest contribution to the verse novel genre. With a cast of over one hundred characters, this book is a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.
POEM OF THE MONTH:
Employment [II]
by GEORGE HERBERT
He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stirre
And trade in courtesies and wit
Quitting the furre
To cold complexions needing it.
Man is no starre, but a quick coal
Of mortall fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth controll
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.
When th’ elements did for place contest
With Him, whose will
Ordain’d the highest to be best:
The earth sat still,
And by the others is opprest.
Life is a businesse, not good cheer;
Ever in warres.
The sunne still shineth there or here,
Whereas the starres
Watch an advantage to appeare.
Oh that I were an orenge-tree,
That busie plant!
Then should I ever laden be,
And never want
Some fruit for him that dressed me
But we are still too young, or old;
There man is gone,
Before we do our wares unfold:
So we freeze on,
Until the grave increase our cold.
Oh that I were an orenge-tree… This stand out line did a great deal for me as a poet. The sheer risks it takes: asking a reader to imagine that the poet was wishing himself to be an orange tree, of all the items in and out of nature, an orange tree! The rest of the poem is fine, verging on great, but even better, two-thirds of the way through, here’s George Herbert going off at a simply wonderful tangent, certainly not one I ever expected at my first reading aged 19 or 20, a tangent not just involving in the unexpected but the unexpected that works, with risks that all poets should learn by. So never forgetting this encounter, and paying due homage to Reverend George Herbert, Vicar of Bemerton, as he was and where he did much of his writing, in my prose-poem sequence ‘Freely and with the appropriate sense of space’ I’ve recast him some centuries on in mid-sixties suburban Melbourne.
Thus: George Herbert is a well-meaning 60s suburban vicar who runs a Youth Fellowship following Sunday Evensong. Contemporary folk music is played and although this sometimes bewilders Rev. Herbert, he still tries enjoying it. The kids love him and call him Herbie. When a smart alec interloper tries interrupting their vicar with ‘What ho, sirrah, thou art but a coxcomb and a knave!” the kids become quite vehement: “You leave Herbie alone!”