Powell, Craig

Australia, (b. 1940)

Hospital pig farm
for Gus

  1. Laid out almost like a Roman villa–
  2. the pens of whitewashed concrete swept clean
  3. of any trace or tang of the pigs.
  4. Sometimes one of their old keepers, leucotomised
  5. or half-wit, will stumble down the farm road
  6. led by voices, and will stare
  7. into the broken troughs, the high disconsolate barn,
  8. searching for some old sow whose hide was
  9. gritty beneath his thumbs that day
  10. she drowsed among cabbage leaves.
  11. A vegetable stillness
  12. grew round the pigs: receptive,
  13. in their own way, like the Gadarene swine
  14. –absorbing into their ancient bestial calm
  15. the demons under the eyelash, under the skin,
  16. the jagged froth of the epileptic–
  17. yet not stampeding over any cliffs of the mind:
  18. conquering, rather. Dream-huge
  19. their absence grunts and shambles down the planked-
  20. up sty. The ruckled sheds
  21. lean against nothing. To the wind they tender
  22. their scoured ribs and cavities,
  23. manure and iron. Something of the old peace.

 Craig Powell. A Country Without Exiles: Poems. Five Dock, NSW: South Head Press (1972).

About the Poet:

Craig Powell, Australia, (b. 1940), is a poet and psychiatrist. Powell graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in medicine and went on to train as a psychiatrist at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. After returning to Australia he has worked in private practice in Sydney from 1982 until 2012, and as a Visiting Medical Officer at the Prince of Wales Hospital.

Powell began publishing poetry in the mid 1960s, his work first appearing in journals and magazines including Twentieth Century, The Realist, and Poetry Australia. To date Powell has published nine poetry collections, including a volume of Selected Poems 1963-1977 (1978), and he remains a regular contributor to Australian literary magazines.

His poetry, which often reflects on his relationships and experiences with people suffering from mental illnesses, has also been strongly influenced by his psychoanalytic training. [DES-04/18]