Patricia Sykes
A poet returns to the Convent on her own terms. Read more on The Abbotsford Convent website.
Listen to Patricia on ABC Conversations.
Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems have won the John Shaw Neilson, Tom Collins, and Newcastle Poetry Prizes. Wire Dancing, her first collection, arose out of her experiences as a performer with the Women’s Circus and was commended in the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. Her second, Modewarre – home ground, was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Award. In 2006 she was Asialink writer in residence, Malaysia. Patricia’s collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Australia and internationally, most recently New York. Her most recent collection is The Abbotsford Mysteries. A selection of her poems is currently being translated into Chinese and will be published as a joint English/Chinese collection by Flying Islands Books.
Modewarre is the Indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. Three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the Indigenous), biziura lobata (the colonial), musk duck (the common). It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.
2004 | ISBN 9781876756505 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 120 pp
Older Titles
It takes neither dynamite / nor earth quake /
the business of circus / is its own upheaval
Circus as drama and risk, as exuberance and irrepressible spirit, is the central metaphor Patricia Sykes uses to open a world where public and private share the same tightrope. The poems speak of women searching for footholds along the spectrums of politics, power, history, culture and relationships.
Theirs are performances of celebration and hope as they wire dance through circumcision and incest, madness and suicide, genocide and war. There is passion and resistance, hot comedy and fire in the belly. Falling is the first victory, balance is the ultimate skill.
plastic surgery / will not cure / the mortalities / of a circus maximus
1999 | ISBN 9781875559909 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 151 pages
Adrienne Liebmann
Jen Jordan
Deb Lewis
Louise Radcliffe-Smith
Have you ever wanted to join the circus? Wondered what goes on behind the scenes? What trapeze artists think about as they swing through the air? How fit you have to be to be a performer? Reading this book lets you become an armchair acrobat. Established in 1991 as a community theatre project to work with survivors of sexual assault, the Women’s Circus has gone on to create innovative shows, toured to China in 1995 and has maintained a training program for women of all shapes and sizes, backgrounds, ages and abilities for fifteen years.
1997 | ISBN 9781875559558 | Paperback | 240 x 170 mm | 285 pp
Ebooks
As if we fit together like old shards
orphan, unfortunate, drunk, prostitute
in a neat history of broken glass
The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, the grey mince-meat walls, of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, the razor of power having such adult force, the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.
The Abbotsford Mysteries incorporates a medley of voices and experiences, drawn from official histories and other archives: the memories of Patricia and her sisters, and the oral memoirs of over seventy women, interviewed by Patricia during 2003-04. All had been resident at the Good Shepherd Convent at some stage during 1927-74.
Voice is central to the work: the persona speaking the poems does so on behalf of all the voices who contributed their memoirs. Often their words are woven verbatim into the poems, giving a particular and poetic resonance to a significant aspect of Melbourne and Australia’s institutional, religious, social, and architectural history.
As if we fit together like old shards
orphan, unfortunate, drunk, prostitute
in a neat history of broken glass
The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, the grey mince-meat walls, of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, the razor of power having such adult force, the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.
The Abbotsford Mysteries incorporates a medley of voices and experiences, drawn from official histories and other archives: the memories of Patricia and her sisters, and the oral memoirs of over seventy women, interviewed by Patricia during 2003-04. All had been resident at the Good Shepherd Convent at some stage during 1927-74.
Voice is central to the work: the persona speaking the poems does so on behalf of all the voices who contributed their memoirs. Often their words are woven verbatim into the poems, giving a particular and poetic resonance to a significant aspect of Melbourne and Australia’s institutional, religious, social, and architectural history.
Modewarre is the Indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. Three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the Indigenous), biziura lobata (the colonial), musk duck (the common). It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes-ironic eye.
2004 | 120 pp
Modewarre is the Indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. Three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the Indigenous), biziura lobata (the colonial), musk duck (the common). It sweeps its subjects along in a flow of striking images and strong feelings, these buoyed by an intelligent sense of poetic structure and modulated by a sometimes ironic eye.
2004 | 120 pp
It takes neither dynamite / nor earth quake /
the business of circus / is its own upheaval
Circus as drama and risk, as exuberance and irrepressible spirit, is the central metaphor Patricia Sykes uses to open a world where public and private share the same tightrope. The poems speak of women searching for footholds along the spectrums of politics, power, history, culture and relationships.
Theirs are performances of celebration and hope as they wire dance through circumcision and incest, madness and suicide, genocide and war. There is passion and resistance, hot comedy and fire in the belly. Falling is the first victory, balance is the ultimate skill.
plastic surgery / will not cure / the mortalities / of a circus maximus
1999 | 151 pages
It takes neither dynamite / nor earth quake /
the business of circus / is its own upheaval
Circus as drama and risk, as exuberance and irrepressible spirit, is the central metaphor Patricia Sykes uses to open a world where public and private share the same tightrope. The poems speak of women searching for footholds along the spectrums of politics, power, history, culture and relationships.
Theirs are performances of celebration and hope as they wire dance through circumcision and incest, madness and suicide, genocide and war. There is passion and resistance, hot comedy and fire in the belly. Falling is the first victory, balance is the ultimate skill.
plastic surgery / will not cure / the mortalities / of a circus maximus
1999 | 151 pages
Patricia Sykes
As if we fit together like old shards
orphan, unfortunate, drunk, prostitute
in a neat history of broken glass
The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, the grey mince-meat walls, of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, the razor of power having such adult force, the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.
The Abbotsford Mysteries incorporates a medley of voices and experiences, drawn from official histories and other archives: the memories of Patricia and her sisters, and the oral memoirs of over seventy women, interviewed by Patricia during 2003-04. All had been resident at the Good Shepherd Convent at some stage during 1927-74.
Voice is central to the work: the persona speaking the poems does so on behalf of all the voices who contributed their memoirs. Often their words are woven verbatim into the poems, giving a particular and poetic resonance to a significant aspect of Melbourne and Australia’s institutional, religious, social, and architectural history.
2011 | ISBN 9781876756956 | Paperback | 210 x 150 mm | 95 pp