Poetry at the Pub Flying Islands Launch on TUESDAY

Name: Poetry at the Pub Flying Islands Launch on TUESDAY
Start: 2026-01-20T09:30:00+11:00
Location: The Grand Hotel Newcastle

Schedule

Tue, 20 Jan, 2026 at 09:30 am

UTC+11:00

Location

The Grand Hotel Newcastle | Newcastle, NS

Join us for the first Poetry at the Pub reading for 2026.
Note this reading is on TUESDAY the 20th. THIS IS A ONE-OFF, because the pub has a function on the Monday.
See you at The Grand Hotel at 7:30pm. There will be and open reading set.
This evening will be the launch of three recent Flying Islands Poetry books.
New Ordinance for the Dead by Ron Atilano
In New Ordinance for the Dead, Ronald Araña Atilano’s first collection of poems, abandoned spaces and structures become crevices of meaning, receptacles of myth—a derelict fountain in a city square, an island after a spate of typhoons, a garbage dumpsite. These eighty bilingual poems are itinerant, seeking symbol and metaphor in both centre and periphery, where illumination emerges from the rubble like ‘beheaded stems’, and a muddy puddle reflects the sky like a ‘master looking out a window of fog.’
Ronald Araña Atilano was born in Manila in 1973 and now lives on Awabakal land in Lake Macquarie, New South Wales. His works have been published in the Rabbit Poetry Journal. Westerly Magazine, the Marrow Poetry Journal, Island Magazine Online, Australian Poetry Journal Digital, Locative Magazine, and others. He won first prize at the Katherine Sussanah Prichard Poetry Competition in 2024 and was highly commended in the 2023 Hammond House International Literary Prize. He is a regular reader at the Newcastle Poetry at the Pub where he was Featured Poet in June 2023.
‘The personas in Ronald Atilano’s poems are observant and distant, translating moments of feverish coincidence into slow, reflective contemplation. It’s a privilege to see the bigger picture through these eyes, which connect memory, history, myth and art in such poignant and imaginative ways.’
– Harvey Liu, Locative Magazine

Blimmin’ Wimmin by Dael Allison
The women-centred poems in Blimmin’ Wimmin are a femage to artists, writers, mothers, animals and plants, real and imagined, that inspire by their acts, what they create and their presence on the planet. In this celebration of individuality, community, activism, environment survival, audacity and the ideology of feminism, the poet also reflects on her journey to understanding ways to live a meaningful life.
Dael Allison writes poetry, fiction and essays, and works as an editor. She has won numerous awards for writing, including the International Wildcare Prize for Environmental Writing, a Varuna Award for an unpublished novel, three writing residencies at Varuna, and a Wildcare residency on Maria Island, Tasmania.
In 2024, Dael was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle. Fig, her short story cycle based in the Hunter Valley, will be published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2026.
Dael’s Masters in Creative Writing, from the University of Technology, Sydney, explored in poetry the life and work of Australia’s first modernist artist, Ian Fairweather. Poems from her book, Fairweather’s Raft (Walleah Press, 2012), featured in an ABC Poetica soundscape in 2014.

Food of Love – Concert Pieces by Kit Kelen
Compiled over a ten year period, Kit Kelen’s Food of Love – Concert Pieces offers the reader one hundred and one short poems, each devoted to a particular piece of (mainly) classical music. On the playlist, music for every taste! From Holst to Stravinsky, from Borodin to Hildegard of Bingen, to contemporary Australian composers such as Brenda Gifford, Sally Greenaway and Joseph Tawadros. With themes from nature, war, mythology and romance, with echoes of the concert hall, of cinema, of animation, the range of matter and method of the poems is as broad as the music they honour.
The launch will be elevated to even further brilliance with the musical accompaniment of keyboardist extraordinaire Paul Searles. Paul's musical mastery enhances and demonstrates the work in this collection immeasurably.
Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a poet and painter, resident on Worimi lands, in the Myall Lakes of NSW, Australia. Published widely since the seventies, he has more than a dozen full length collections in English as well as translated books of poetry in Chinese (several), Portuguese (several), French, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian, Filipino, Greek, Romanian and Esperanto. Kit’s latest volume of poetry in English is Book of Mother, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2022.
Kit has shortlisted for and won poetry prizes since the eighties (an ABC/Bicentennial Award). His first book The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees won an Anne Elder in the nineties. In 2024 Kit Kelen was the winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize.
Kit has been writer/artist in Residence in many parts of the world – in Australia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Iceland, Finland, Romania, the US and Cyprus. A number of these residencies have led to book publications – for instance Bundanon Residencies produced his books Time with the Sky and To the Single Man’s Hut. Time at the Messen residency on the Hardanger Fjord produced Poor Man’s Coat and a book in Norwegian entitled Glasfjorden (the glass fjord).
Kit has had ten solo painting and drawing exhibitions – in Australia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Macao. Recent exhibitions include Palimpspectre (in 2023, at the Manning Regional Gallery, NSW) and word & unword (2024) at the WORDXIMAGE gallery in Maitland.
Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he taught for many years, Kit Kelen is also a Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle and a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Malmö, in Sweden.
Series Editor for Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series (with now more than one hundred volumes), Kit has mentored many poets and translators from various parts of the world, and conducted a number of on-line communities of practice in poetry (most notably Project 366 [from 2016-2020]). He currently runs Flying Islands’ yearlong on-line poetry manuscript workshop.
You can follow Kit’s work-in-progress at the Daily Kit – https://thedailykitkelen.blogspot.com/
If you can’t join us in person, join us on zoom or watch on Facebook!
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88573698030?pwd=frDS2dcbMgorCrbGScVnfXtZLMaeqH.1
Meeting ID: 885 7369 8030
Passcode: 139548