RUNNER-UP IN THE 2024 JOHN O’CONNOR AWARD:
Photography is a complicated thing
from “Memento mori”
if I throw away all the imperfect expressions
can I convince myself I never made that face?
If we never saw ourselves from birth to death?
No mirrors no cameras
no comments from the friend who says
you will never be lovelier than you are now.
Don’t Stop This Old Spell
Juliet McAra
Available 19 September 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7385824-9-5
paperback; 78 p.
148 mm x 210 mm
rrp $25
Bringing an artist’s eye to the business of being human – the joys, the surprises, the sorrows – Juliet McAra’s arresting first collection is an exploration of people, places and creatures. A lascivious eel, a superstitious prophet, two judgmental kōtuku, and a handsome submarine Captain are just some of the characters you’ll meet along the way, traveling through time and space against the pulse of a coming winter. Strange and strangely familiar, these poems will return to you again and again.
I am haunted
from “The last Viking”
by the walrus skull with tusks, the
whalebone smoothing-board,
the stirrups and spurs, the scabbard
Halfdan made. Which horse
was ridden, which war was fought?
Juliet McAra’s work is as open and clear as a view from a hilltop. Her poems tell the truth about increasingly difficult subjects until they confront us with raw grief and absence, and then we realise that this is what the book has been about all along. This is poetry that reminds us that there are some things we can’t avoid, and those are the things to sing about.
– ERIK KENNEDY
What does this eye do, to avoid
from “Gaze”
the view below?
Look up and away
until the wind shifts
back to the west,
across the Mediterranean.
There’s a shine on the eyeball
but not a tear.
Some inner clenching, a mental wall
of avoidance. Because if one,
then a whole storm:
Many ghosts haunt this arresting, richly layered, elegiac collection. Some hover in a past long gone and elsewhere; others, one in particular, continue to exert an aching absence recent and local. There are flickering echoes of Homer, the sagas, Coleridge, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, evocations of painters such as Bill Hammond … There’s a rich variety of forms (list poems, open form poems, poems with refrains, a tritina). There’s a quiet exactness of rhythm and phrasing which suddenly bursts into wonder at the natural world thronging and teeming around us. Don’t Stop This Old Spell has a distinctive magic.
– HARRY RICKETTS
2024 John O’Connor Award judge
and she stops, puts down the tools
from “The Dutch dental hygienist”
and places her warm dry latex-covered hands
against your cheeks
and in a voice accented
with the flat low lands
cries like a maternal crow aw aw aw
and your heart settles
and you both
continue on your way.
Available wherever good books are sold, or direct from SVP by clicking below:
Sudden Valley Press 