{"id":5058,"date":"2022-09-01T17:54:37","date_gmt":"2022-09-01T07:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=5058"},"modified":"2022-09-01T18:00:59","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T07:30:59","slug":"poetry-spotlight-sweet-river-by-jack-hibberd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2022\/09\/poetry-spotlight-sweet-river-by-jack-hibberd\/","title":{"rendered":"POETRY SPOTLIGHT: ‘Sweet River’ by Jack Hibberd"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This week’s spotlight shines on Jack Hibberd’s most recent poetry collection, highlighting the titular poem ‘Sweet River’.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Post written by Polly Grant Butler<\/pre>\n
Jack Hibberd \u2013 medical practitioner, playwright, novelist and poet \u2013 has had a long and prolific career in the arts, writing over sixty plays, numerous poetry collections, screenplays and novels, and co-founding the Australian Performing Group, an experimental theatre ensemble once based in Melbourne. Much of his work is satirical, with a tone that is both acutely perceptive and radically flippant. Language, meanwhile, is treated with the utmost respect. Notably, throughout his work, poeticism and colloquialism are shown to be equals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sweet River<\/em> <\/a>is, perhaps, a departure from some of Jack Hibberd’s earlier work. While the collection is mottled with occasional playfulness, as a whole it is mournful, regarding humankind with contempt, ageing as quick, and death as inevitable.<\/p>\n
And yet there is an inverse for the melancholy. Throughout the poems, rivers and water are used as an anthesis to human wreckage, a symbol, maybe, of hope. In his introduction to the collection, Barry Oakley observes that ‘there’s always the sweet river, pristine & beautiful, memorably mirrored by a master wordsmith’.<\/p>\n
In ‘Wishful Thinking’, one of the funnier poems in the collection, the speaker desires the rain, so that it wipes out ‘the Vatican, \/ Wall Street, Beverley Hills, Miami, \/ the IMF, World Bank, and the City’ as well as ‘celebrities, fashionistas, \/ the Chicago School and Friedmanites’.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Many of the poems in Sweet River <\/a><\/em>depict mortality in a way that is both devastating and unequivocally universal. However, these are poems that are perhaps better read in quiet solitude. Maybe next to a fire, with a glass of red. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this week’s poetry spotlight, I have decided to highlight the title poem, a beautifully rhythmic ode to the river and its sweetness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This week’s spotlight shines on Jack Hibberd’s most recent poetry collection, highlighting the titular poem ‘Sweet River’.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[792,80,315,855,8],"tags":[864,856,46,862,858],"class_list":["post-5058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australian","category-for-fun","category-poetry-2","category-poetry-spotlight","category-we-love-books","tag-australian-poetry","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-spotlight","tag-poets"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1jA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5058"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5081,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058\/revisions\/5081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}