“Her great orbit is full, and then her beams shine brightest as she increases. So she is a sure token and a sign to mortal men.” (‘To Selene’, The Homeric Hymns) On the silken mud of the estuary floor the sea is drawn from the channel’s branching veins, creeping semidiurnal under her spell. In thisContinue reading “Selene”
Category Archives: Poetry
Port Chalmers
Port, Dogtown, Koputai, names good and ill, you look outward to oceans, waiting for the world. Cruise liners and log boats snuggle your wharves. A thousand trunks of Pinus Radiata are matchsticks piled before your crow’s nest lookout, the channel a blue stripe down ruffled green fur. Ships glide through the throat of the harbour,Continue reading “Port Chalmers”
Ancestral Chant of the Sea People
Many steps brought us here. We wandered, we strode, we contained purpose within ourselves. We halted, stopped at fen and bog, fumid clouds hazing crooked walls and coarse sea language spoken. Northern islands clamped in thighs of fog that grasped and held our septs beneath umber cast of hills, soft ancient fields, hard-tempered crust andContinue reading “Ancestral Chant of the Sea People”
The National Conversation
Published today by the Pantograph Punch
Bea$t of the Hour
Night of the Realm
Arise Sir John. For services to Christendom and sticking it to Kim Dot Com, for being you – a Kiwi bloke who likes a joke and ponytails to grasp and stroke. You saw us proud and reflected our ambition, a mirror held to our 21st century condition, an amiable void encased in a suit performingContinue reading “Night of the Realm”
Covfefe – a poem
Meta Mnemonics help him recollect his nuclear codes jammed in somewhere behind his twitching frontal lobes. His fish eye lens compulsively filming the inside of the zoo as he dials the Kremlin hotline to ask what should I do? A pumped up alpha politico steaming with roid rage, his fingers tap compulsively before his mind’s engaged. AContinue reading “Covfefe – a poem”
Ambient Terror available now
Released 10 May 2017 at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival, Ambient Terror is the third volume of poetry from Dunedin writer Victor Billot.
Beast of the Hour
DWRF17
Massive week at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival 2017. Launched Ambient Terror at Chain Reaction, a multiple book launch with fellow Dunedin Writers Peter Olds, John Gibb, Paddy Richardson and Huberta Hellendoorn, at the Athenaeum on Wednesday night, followed on directly by MCing the launch of Manifesto: 101 Political Poems at the Leviathan. FridayContinue reading “DWRF17”
Chain Reaction: Book launch
A group book launch to celebrate a goodly crop of new publications: Peter Olds’ poetry collection Taking My Jacket for a Walk (Cold Hub Press); Paddy Richardson’s novel Through the Lonesome Dark (Upstart Press); Victor Billot’s third volume of poetry Ambient Terror (Limetone Singularity); Huberta Hellendoorn’s memoir Astride a Fierce Wind (Makaro Press); and John Gibb’s poetryContinue reading “Chain Reaction: Book launch”
