Australian poets Toby Davidson and Mark Reid speak to Verity La La editor Michele Seminara about their new collections, The Grand Reopening and The Blessed Affliction. You can read a poem from each collection below. Please enjoy the podcast!
Livestreamed Funerals
Toby Davidson
Words, by weight of numbers, do.
Burnt ones curl and elevate.
The insufficiency the same, resistance —
but death is a jealous distance
pushing us into the frame regardless,
bonding or branching down
each remote face. We’re physically
drawn to the generous still,
despite winning, which pales
before loss when it’s not a game.
The family rise in parts and together,
to music and of it. Their tremor
speaks louder. We cover
our mouths in grey studies.
Sonnet
Mark Reid
Faith begins with itself,
moves from itself
to itself, gathering stones
from the straight road
(as it moves).
When the horseless carriage appeared,
the people stared.
They lined the street in disbelief.
They held up their needles
that the eye might pass through.
I know that salvation
is the promise of the wicked,
& yet I believe
the poem.
The Grand Reopening & The Blessed Affliction are available from Puncher & Wattmann.
The Grand Reopening, Toby Davidson’s third collection, was written during the post-pandemic return to ‘normality’, a fundamentally abnormal experience now largely consigned to the memory hole reserved for the worst of Australian history. Davidson’s works refuse this forgetting and instead portray a changed world re-encountering itself, from Sydney bars to Dublin’s streets to the ancient volcano beneath Santorini where, as ever, nature is teacher.
The Blessed Affliction is an apt title to describe thirty years of the work of Mark Reid. From the hospital poems of Parochial to the divine disputations of later works such as The Address Book sequence, Reid matches despair with wit in pitching the insurmountable questions of the infinite against the plain fact of the ordinary. Neither comes out on top. We are blessed. We are afflicted. Holding our world together is the necessity, the hope, of poetry. This volume presents the pick of Reid’s first five published collections, along with the new book-length title collection: The Blessed Affliction.
Toby Davidson is a poet and Australian poetry scholar now living on Darkinjung Country on the NSW Central Coast. His prior collections are Four Oceans (Puncher and Wattman, 2020), Beast Language (Five Islands Press, 2012) and, as editor, Francis Webb’s Collected Poems (UWA Publishing, 2011). His recent works include the literary biography Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s Life with Poetry (UWA Publishing) and his third poetry collection, The Grand Reopening (Puncher and Wattmann, 2025).
Mark Reid’s previous books include A Difficult Faith, Looking Out From Bashan & the award-winning Parochial. Variously employed in theatre, television, kitchens and aged-care, he worked a decade on the wards of a public hospital. Resident in Western Australia for twenty years, he now lives quietly in the NSW Shoalhaven. His most recent work is The Blessed Affliction.