Bonny Cassidy – March 2015

World Poetry Day – March 21 2015

Bonny is a poet, critic and creative writing teacher at RMIT. She is a past President of Sydney PEN, was a commissioned poet in The Red Room Company’s 2004 Toilet Doors project and, as Education Officer and Chief Researcher for The Red Room Company, was instrumental in the establishment of the Papercuts national poetry education program. Bonny has also developed poetry education programs for Melbourne Free University. She undertook an Asialink/Malcolm Robertson Foundation literature fellowship in Japan, and has been a recipient of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry.  Her other works include The Salon Anthology of New Writing + Art (co-editor), a libretto, Wounding Song (produced by the University of Wollongong), and an adaptation of Eve Langley’s The Pea-pickers for chamber opera (with composer Jeff Galea).

Certain Fathoms glimmers with precisely observed moments that make a strange place of the familiar. These poems speak not only to each other but to and of other writers: Eve Langley, John Berryman, JS Harry. Cassidy knits seemingly small phrases and events into glimpses of a vast, interconnected whole. Cool, yet engaged, Cassidy’s poems swell with the movements people and things make, making them brightly and newly visible.

Final Theory
Giramondo Publishing Co, 2014; ISBN 9781922146618
Final Theory is a long poem told in episodes, combining two fragmentary story lines – the one following a couple as they travel through landscapes which are at different times pristine and ravaged by progress; the other portraying the sensations of a child tumbling through the ocean, encountering evidence of lost worlds. Researched and composed in countries that were once part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana – New Zealand, Australia and Antarctica – the poem places its figures within vast scales of time and space.