‘Never predictable or dull’

Carol was an excellent commentator on poetry, shrewd and deep-thinking but able to express her thoughts in plain English rather than academic jargon. Her taste in poems was eclectic and very original; one didn’t always share it, but it was never predictable or dull. Sheenagh Pugh, Shetland

‘Carol made Mondays something to look forward to’

Looking out for Carol Rumens’ poem of the week made Mondays something to look forward to. It was a weekly fixture to break off for a few minutes at some point in the day and be introduced to something or someone I inevitably didn’t know, but was glad to meet. I’ve been checking the culture section weekly since her last column and hoping Carol was enjoying a holiday somewhere. So I’m sad to hear we won’t be getting the benefit of her generous insights again, but what an archive to have left us. Thank you Carol. Anonymous

Carol was good enough to choose my poem, Material Culture, as a poem of the week in 2015. Not only did she give it an acute introduction – probably better than it deserved – she also was a sympathetic ear when the, shall we say, rather snarky comments rolled in below the line from the Guardian’s famous poetry reading public! Her kindness to me as well as the Guardian column led me to her own poetry, which is very fine. I’m surprised that she was 81: she seemed much younger. David Ward, retired poet, Virginia

‘She lit the way for female poets’

I took workshops with Carol in University College Cork in the 1990s and she was an inspiration. Always very grateful for her support of my work and many other poets – and as a way-lighter for female poets – whose work I admire, and for her insight into poetry through the Guardian column. One of a kind. She will be much missed. Anonymous

‘A tremendous poet, cosmopolitan humanist, inspiring mentor and friend’

Carol was always politically relevant, always promoted poetry as a vital, nuanced, informed and emotionally intelligent discourse about world events. I’ll be for ever grateful for her attention to my work in the column and am glad I could help publish her work as well. Rest in poetry, Carol Rumens – tremendous poet, sparkling, generous, cosmopolitan humanist and my wonderful, inspiring mentor and friend. My deepest sympathies to Carol’s family and all her loved ones. Naomi Foyle, Chichester

‘She had a common touch that made her columns profoundly democratic’

How much of a loss Carol Rumens is to us poets and to the Guardian. I’m shocked by her sudden death (she used two of my poems in the column within the last 18 months). She was a uniquely even-handed appreciator of poems from all sectors of the poetry world but had a common touch that made her columns profoundly democratic. Her achievement was exceptional and remarkable. She was personally kind to me when a hostile poet upset me at one of my first festival readings, and I’ve never forgotten that humanity in her. Gwyneth Lewis, poet, Wales

‘Enormous generosity’

I was amazed the first time that Carol featured my work in poem of the week. And when she did so a second time, I was beyond astounded. She also included me in the Smart Devices selection, which meant an awful lot to me. But these things are just personal examples of her enormous generosity. She will be missed by poets, publishers and readers of poetry. Billy Mills, Ireland

‘You will always be in my heart’

I feel so sad tonight having just read this article about Carol Rumens’ death. I am sure all of us who followed and commented on her weekly poetry choices are feeling the same. I can’t write you a poem Carol. but you will always be in my heart for your words and wisdom and humour over the years. Thank you Carol. Patricia, England

‘She featured a poet I recommended to her — then dedicated a poem to him after his death’

I never met Carol Rumens in person but, from May 2016 when she featured To a Nightingale by the English late-modernist poet RF Langley, I began posting comments below the line of poem of the week, sometimes engaging in discussions with her and others in that space. She became the most influential facilitator of poetic talent in the English-language media through her stewardship of poem of the week.

In between, she wrote often astute critical commentaries introducing work by poets from all over the world. She may have been underrated or undervalued as a contemporary British poet and critic, but she never condescended to the unknown or unsung. She was generous enough to consider recommendations from others, as when, in June 2018, she featured Leaving home at 10, from Nigerian poet and literary scholar Harry Garuba’s final collection Animist Chants and Memorials (2017), a copy of which I had sent her. Garuba died of leukaemia, aged 61, in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2020, and Carol wrote the poem A Bed of Wild Strawberries, dedicated to him, and published in Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love: A Gedenkschrift for Harry Garuba (2022). Idowu Omoyele, Kent

‘Carol’s choices were eclectic, not always to my taste but that didn’t matter’

I’ve always liked poetry but it hovered in the background playing second fiddle to novels and films. When I discovered the Guardian online 20 years ago, I noticed the PotW column and decided to join in to bring poetry in from the cold. Carol’s choices were eclectic, not always to my taste, but that often didn’t matter as it was a great insight into how work was created. She joined in too, so wasn’t aloof. Edward Taylor, Lancashire

‘I lacked confidence, then Carol chose one of my poems for her column’

Carol chose one of my poems early on for her poem of the week: it was ahead of my first book publication and I was still a little confused about “how to poet” and “whether to poet”: I lacked confidence and couldn’t feel my voice as actually mine. Every poem I wrote seemed to me a mishmash of other, older, better poems. It’s impossible to overstate how much the mere fact of being taken seriously, of having my poem delicately and seriously taken apart, each piece held up to the light, made me certain that I wasn’t going wrong or presuming too much. I have been grateful for more than 20 years for that sensitivity and insight. Anonymous

‘Many of her selections have become my favourite poems’

I looked forward to Mondays with Carol’s choice of poem. So many of her selections have become favourite poems and she introduced me to many new poets. Douglas Kemp

British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81.

Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Rumens’ poems, often profoundly political, were published across more than a dozen collections, including Animal People, De Chirico’s Threads and Blind Spots. She also wrote plays, fiction, criticism and published poetry in translation.

She began writing the Guardian poem of the week column in October 2007. Over two decades, she developed an engaged readership, responding to each column in the comments section.

Rumens was born on 10 December 1944 in Forest Hill, south London. She began a philosophy degree, but left before finishing it and later received a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.

Her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973. In the mid-70s, she worked as an editor on Croydon-based magazine Pick, before becoming poetry editor at Quarto and Literary Review in the early 80s.

Through the 80s, she published several collections, including Star Whisper, The Greening of the Snow Beach and her first volume of selected poems. She also collaborated on the first of several translated volumes of poetry from Russian, by poets including Evgeny Rein and Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry in translation “revitalises our daily, cliche-haunted vocabulary”, Rumens wrote in 2007. “It extends us in the way real travelling does, giving us new sounds, sights and smells.”

Rumens taught at a number of universities, including the University of Hull, where she established an MA in creative writing, and the University of Bangor, where she was a longtime visiting professor.

The poet was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. She was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize for best single poem twice, and the same year, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley award.

Her first Guardian poem of the week choice in was Far Rockaway by the Welsh-language poet Iwan Llwyd, translated by Robert Minhinnick. Over the following two decades, she would write nearly 1,000 columns, featuring poems by household names in between those of lesser-known writers.

For her final column, published in February, she chose two poems by Matthew Rice. In the comments section, one reader thanked her for her “usual great choice of poems and erudite introduction”.

In 2019, a collection of 52 poem of the week columns and their accompanying commentaries were published in a book titled Smart Devices.

“I’m still surprised to find myself writing a weekly blog at all,” Rumens wrote in 2019. She described feeling “electrified” by the research process behind the columns. “To lift off from the launching pad of a poem, and bounce and float through the galaxies of Search, learning bits and pieces which ought to be unrelated but which mesh because I am their narrator, is as exciting as the process of writing a poem – and, in fact, remarkably similar to it.”

Taking on the column, “I think I wanted to learn how to think about poems, as well as find out what I thought of them,” she continued. “That’s the selfish, self-loving bit. The more altruistic motive is that I feel poets owe each other (or each other’s poems) a duty of care. One person can’t do very much but they can do something, make a few sounds to erase the stupid silence which hangs around poems and collections of poems.

“I’m sick of hearing that too much poetry is written and published. No, too little poetry is taught and read. A poem isn’t usually a butterfly or a mobile phone. It deserves a longer life. I wish I wrote better about poems and poetry, but I know I should go on writing, any way, as best I can.”

Adelaide writers’ week was sacrificed to save the 2026 Adelaide festival, an event that ploughs more than $60m into South Australia’s economy each year, documents show.

After the 8 January announcement by the Adelaide festival board that controversial Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah had been dumped from the AWW program, it wasn’t just fellow Australian and international guest writers and academics who began pulling out in droves.

Headline acts for Australia’s longest running and most prestigious international arts festival were also threatening to walk, according to freedom of information documents obtained by Guardian Australia.

Internal briefings prepared for an extraordinary board meeting held on 12 January – two days after three board members had resigned in protest and the day after the chair, Tracey Whiting, had stood down – warned of a “cascade of withdrawals” that could see the entire 2026 Adelaide festival collapse. AWW is overseen by the Adelaide festival board.

The internal briefings reveal major Australian theatre and dance companies programmed for the festival wrote to its artistic director, Matthew Lutton, warning they were “considering their positions” after the AWW boycotts began. The companies’ identities were redacted in the documents.

And while the local exodus was already in motion, management warned it was bracing for a second – and global – wave of cancellations, as the allegations of censorship and government interference reached international acts.

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If an announcement was made within the next 18 hours stating the 2026 AWW had been cancelled, the briefing said, “it may prevent artists from withdrawing from the 2026 Adelaide festival program and will avoid a cascade of withdrawals in the coming days, thereby mitigating reputational and financial damage”.

Any delays in announcing the cancellation of the AWW would “significantly increase the risk that the reputational damage from Adelaide Writers’ Week is transferred to Adelaide Festival”.

Moreover, the briefing said future Adelaide festivals could also be at risk.

“Currently, when invitations are extended to national and international artists, they accept without hesitation, as they do not consider the possibility that their values may not align with those of Adelaide Festival,” the briefing said.

“However, if artists were to withdraw from Adelaide Festival, expressing concerns about its values, this could create significant friction in future years. Such withdrawals might lead artists to hesitate before accepting invitations and to reconsider their willingness to associate with Adelaide Festival.”

At the extraordinary board meeting, AWW director, Louise Adler, told the three remaining board members, Lutton and Adelaide festival’s chief executive, Julian Hobba, that out of 165 AWW sessions, only 12 remained intact.

She urged the board to issue a full public apology to Abdel-Fattah and cancel the 2026 event – which was by this point unsalvageable – and concentrate on rebuilding for a 2027 return.

Adler then walked out of the meeting. Her detailed resignation statement appeared in the Guardian the following day.

The board continued its deliberations, ultimately deciding to axe AWW 2026.

While SA premier Peter Malinauskas has publicly denied his office exerted undue pressure on the festival’s independence, the FoI documents suggest his 2 January letter to the board was the primary catalyst for the crisis.

Minutes from previous meetings show that as late as 20 December, the board was standing by its decision to include Abdel-Fattah in its 2026 lineup, noting she had “a long and distinguished career in academia” and her cancellation “would risk placing her in the same category as individuals associated with hate-speech or hate-crime activity, which she is not”.

However, three days after Malinauskas wrote to the board, saying: “I am of the view that Dr Abdel-Fattah’s appearance should be removed from the Program”, the board complied, “in light of recent national events, and Government correspondence”.

“The Board agreed that Government involvement materially changes the risk profile and that failure to act could jeopardise current and future funding, and the Festival’s broader viability”, minutes from the 5 January meeting show.

Despite receiving $9.8m in state and federal funding, the Adelaide festival recoups almost all of that investment through more than $4m in ticket sales and more than $3m in sponsorship and philanthropy. It contributed $62.6m in gross expenditure to the South Australian economy in 2025.

In contrast, the AWW is the Adelaide Festival Corporation’s loss leader, driving foot traffic and hospitality spending to the state, but contributing virtually nothing to the festival’s box office bottom line. It recorded more than 160,000 attendances in 2025, but the vast majority of its sessions are free to the public.

In January, as the implosion of Adelaide writers’ week made headlines around Australia and the world, Rosemarie Milsom was watching closely.

The Adelaide festival board, which oversees AWW, had overridden the literary festival’s director, Louise Adler, and disinvited the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah over past comments she’d made about Israel and Zionism. This decision resulted not in a quieter, less-controversial festival as the board members may have hoped, but a boycott by 200-odd writers, the resignation of Adler – followed by the whole board – a potential defamation lawsuit against the South Australian premier and the collapse of AWW.

It was not yet public knowledge then that, as the director of Newcastle writers’ festival, Milsom had also booked Abdel-Fattah, five months earlier. But Milsom had predicted this exact controversy could happen and had been preparing for months.

On Friday AWW announced that Milsom has been appointed the new director of AWW – a position she accepted with excitement and understandable caution. She is a frequent attender and admires AWW’s “wonderful” commitment to keeping sessions free: “I grew up in a single-parent family in Sydney and access to free arts events really shaped who I am … I’d be shocked if that changed.” She adds with a laugh: “I think if it did, there’d be much more substantial outrage than what happened this year!”

Back to that. Both Newcastle and Adelaide made the decision to invite Abdel-Fattah but only one imploded over it. So what went differently for Milsom?

In February, with the ashes of AWW still smouldering, the New South Wales Liberal MP Aileen MacDonald used state parliament to reveal that Milsom had also booked Abdel-Fattah, and questioned why the festival was getting $250,000 in state funding. The premier, Chris Minns, called the Newcastle festival “crazy” and “divisive” but said he would not intervene – by then perhaps mindful of the growing controversy surrounding his South Australian counterpart Peter Malinauskas’ decision to weigh in against the author to the Adelaide board.

Milsom, who built NWF from the ground up in 2013, stood her ground. She refused to put out generic press statements (“not worth the paper they’re written on”) and directly emailed every booked writer to promise no one would be dropped. She refused to comment on Minns’ “crazy” statement. And, crucially, as her inbox and DMs flooded with abuse, she reminded herself: none of it was really about her.

Milsom was born in Bosnia, into a Bosnian Muslim family, and lost family in the Bosnian genocide; as such, she has strong personal views on politics but also knows the value of objectivity in leadership, and the democratic function of literary festivals.

“Aileen MacDonald asked for our funding to be revoked and I remember thinking, come to Newcastle and say that,” she says. “Come here and talk to all the businesses, the hotels that are booked out, the hire car company that picks the writers up from the airport, the local caterer, the local printers, the musicians that play in the lunch breaks, the tech and sound company. All local. Thousands of dollars invested in this community, before you even get to the audience.

“I remember thinking, I dare Chris Minns to say that in Newcastle. There’s safety in being in Sydney and shooting arrows up the freeway.”

Despite – or perhaps because of – the controversy, audiences galvanised around NWF: this year it celebrated record attendance (a 27% increase on 2025) and there were no protests or boycotts. Milsom’s message to audiences is: “If you want to get sucked into a sensational media headline and buy into pressure from certain sections of the media or the community, that’s your choice. I will get on with my job.”

‘Arts organisations keep making the same mistake’

Milsom remembers when she first experienced pressure to disinvite writers due to their views on Israel and Gaza, back in 2024. “It was unprecedented,” she says. There was no plan in place for something that hadn’t happened before: “The level of emotion that people were feeling, the anger and frustration and hurt about what had happened on October 7 – justifiably so, it was horrific – had suddenly landed on us. And I could tell, if we were caught off-guard, wouldn’t everybody be?”

Milsom credits her 20-year career as a journalist for helping her cope. “I’ve known that pressure to not cover something,” she says. “It’s not a pleasant feeling. You lose sleep. But, at the back of your mind, if you’re a good, decent journalist, you know there’s a bigger reason for you doing a story … Translate that to a writers’ festival – that’s curatorial independence.”

“You have to know why you do what you do. That can get lost when you’re in the midst of an email barrage, or getting terrible threatening DMs and the writers are copping it as well. You basically just want it to go away. And I can appreciate the easiest way for that to happen is to just get rid of the writer – but that is never going to be the solution.”

Some arts organisations, including Creative Australia and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, have cancelled performances and excluded artists whose works or views on the Israel-Palestine conflict have come under criticism. But Milsom says that never achieves what they hope: “I’m really disappointed they keep making the same mistake. If you think the only way to navigate it is to appease one particular group, that’s not a fair response. What happens when you’ve got five groups coming at you? Do you appease all five?”

She worries that the pressure may start to shape decision-making at other festivals, where “they might go, I don’t want any Arab writers in the program, it’s just not worth the trouble”.

She credits the NWF board for backing her in the face of pressure over Abdel-Fattah. “When governance fails, you get what happened in Adelaide. If a board is weak and confused and scared and worried about what sponsors or government are going to say, they turn on you. Strong governance means you’re going to upset people. You will never please everybody. Your decision not to disinvite a writer will disappoint people. But you can move forward with have your integrity in place.”

But, she concedes, that doesn’t make it easy. “I have got to the point a few times with NWF where I’ve thought, I just can’t do it, I don’t want to do it, it’s all too hard,” she says. “I don’t envy anyone in this position. I’m just running a writers’ festival, I’m not running the country. I’m not making decisions about the federal budget, or whether we’re going to war …

“In some ways, it is so ludicrous … Everyone needs to take a step back and actually look at what writers’ festivals are, what we do and what’s at the core of it, which is literature. If you think it’s damaging for writers to be able to speak their mind, that is an alarming state of affairs.”

Adler was known for her vocal commitment to similar principles, and she was still overridden. Is Milsom confident she has the complete backing of the new Adelaide festival board?

“That was one of the first questions I asked, ‘Do you have true independence and policies in place?’ And they said yes,” she says. “If that other board had stayed, there is no way I would have applied. I don’t think many people would have, in all honesty. It could have led to the demise of AWW. That was the line that was drawn.”

So far only one writer is invited to AWW in 2027: Abdel-Fattah, who was invited in a gesture of apology by the new board. Milsom says she is yet to accept. “I appreciate people don’t agree with what she has said. But I still stand by the principle that she should be allowed to have those views and that shouldn’t affect her invitation to a writers’ festival.”

As for Malinauskas, who has been issued two concerns notices by lawyers representing Abdel-Fattah? “I look forward to meeting the premier – I really do,” Milsom says. “We’ll obviously have a professional relationship … I’m really excited about the next three years.”

It is her hope that when AWW comes around in 2027, everyone will simply be relieved it survived. “My sense of it is everyone will have moved on,” she says. “And if you’re still hand-wringing over what happened in 2026, then that’s really on you.”

01.29

When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.

05.29

It was wee Gail’s seventieth birthday
last week and she has a special
seat to sit on all shift

and her hands are old at the task,
old at working the tricks that come
with having laboured

in the same place for so long

and she’s making light work
of sifting defective ring washers
from those within tolerance and

her bench could be a grand piano,
her patch of floor a stage,
and, in another life, it is.

In plastic, a book-length poem cycle by the Northern Irish poet Matthew Rice, the time-stamp titles ensure that clock-watching is an experience readers share with the narrator and his fellow workers through their 12-hour factory night shift. Whether Rice is observing the enforced machine-order of the production line, evaluating his own thoughts about cinema, music and literature, or empathising with the other workers, each individual short poem is a cherished fragment of perception seeking a moment of freedom from the tyranny of its time-stamp. The two pieces I’ve chosen are exactly four hours and more than 20 poems apart; distinct in tone and structure, each registers awareness that the potential of the individuals concerned, as a collective or singly, is frustrated by their socio-economic position.

The workers in 01.29 are on a break, but their star-gazing is presented from the limited and immediate perspective in which the nearest stars are tobacco-sparks, “the exhaled Milky Way / of Bobby’s Golden Virginia”. The Milky Way leads only to earthbound “ways to navigate shift patterns”. Imaginative or intellectual speculation is forbidden by the laws of factory routine that the workers have had to internalise.

Fully aware of that limitation, the speaker keeps possibility tamped down, while simultaneously acknowledging its power. The phrase “insanity of depth” inscribes the dizziness a free-spirited mental navigation of the cosmos might risk. The speaker and his colleagues are necessary conspirators against visions, star-gazers from the depth of despairing realism. While the poem insists on “nothing seismic or anything approaching / truth”, it acknowledges that the denial falls far short of human “depth”. Stars, increasingly distant, mark time like the numerals on the digital clock but infinitely slower: whereas the sparks released from “Bobby’s Golden Virginia” are all too ephemeral, “the dotted starlight/ doesn’t burn fast enough” for the night-shift workers.

In the second poem, the speaker focuses on a single worker, “wee Gail”, and, by the second line, although her 70th birthday was “last week”, the present-continuous tense is seemingly established: “she has a special / seat to sit on all shift”. Her seat may be connected to the friendly recognition of her birthday, but, more likely, she habitually occupies a particular bench-space for ergonomic reasons, in line with company regulations. The image of the seat is rightly left for the reader to form – and then to transform.

Centrally placed, a single line of monosyllables illustrates the one-dimensionality of Gail’s service “in the same place for so long”, but the resumed triplets have her “making light work” of it all as she skilfully performs her task, “sifting defective ring washers / from those within tolerance”. The poet-speaker, too, makes light work of the romantic, celebratory turn after “and” at the end of the third triplet, when the ensuing pause instigates the vision of deft-fingered Gail as, perhaps, a concert pianist. This wouldn’t be impossible “in another life”. Even here, Rice is almost curbed by realism. Somehow, he succeeds in lifting that heavy shadow cast by “another life”, dissolving it in the glow of what feels like genuine admiration and genuine affirmation.

In an endnote, Rice pays tribute to an 1830 book by the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Worker’s Dream in 19th-Century France. In Rancière’s vision of socialism, labourers desire, and have the potential for, freedom from their work. Rice addresses the mental and physical costs of the labour treadmill, and, as a poet and son of a poet, he is haunted by the concept of repressed creative potential in others. The poem about “wee Gail” is a particularly direct and moving expression of that vision.

The fulfillment of Rancière’s ideal looms close to us in the age of AI, with the decline of human labour at even the white-collar level, and in production lines’ replacement-staffing by robots. Freedom for self-fulfillment will be available, in theory, but how will it be inscribed and allocated by our institutions? The many questions will be tough to solve. In the meantime, the poems in plastic both honour and transcend their traditional factory setting, and remind us of how much there could be to gain in the dawning digital era.

To Wordsworth

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.

Shelley’s genre in To Wordsworth has been described as the “corrective tribute”. The euphemism seems to let Shelley off lightly. There’s little doubt that the younger poet intended a combination more abrasive than gently “improving”. The sonnet was published in his 1816 collection, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, in which one of the themes is an idealistic young Romantic poet’s narrative of political disillusion.

Shelley’s technique is artful. The opening address to Wordsworth has a tone of gentle lament, in which the younger poet sees himself and his addressee as sharers of life’s ordinary sorrows and losses, the “common woes”. His quiet affirmation of solidarity is, however, a preparation for stronger censure to follow, and soon we see the place where the weapon is unsheathed: “These common woes I feel. One loss is mine, / Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.” The stop after “I feel” marks the severance. Shelley sees the lost intensity of their once-shared political idealism. All his disillusionment with Wordsworth centres in the verb “deplore”. It describes Shelley’s strength of young feeling, unique and merciless.

The particularly cruel insight (if true) is that Wordsworth’s resigns his power with less suffering than Shelley experiences, observing his resignation. The loss is far more sharply registered by Wordsworth’s once-admiring younger friend – according to his friend’s account. It may be his true response, and a cruel judgment: it isn’t exactly a usable “corrective”.

The “frail bark” and “rock-like refuge” Wordsworth has presented in young Shelley’s view are somewhat conventional metaphors, and seem rather shallowly connected to the work and the life. However, Shelley raises his game. He finds a special decorum in a last longing image of Wordsworth in all his moral presence: “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.” Shelley would have been thinking of the more politically radical sonnets by Wordsworth such as To Toussaint Louverture and possibly the despairing The World Is Too Much With Us. Wordsworth’s nature poems were also important to Shelley, and furthered the democratic vision.

What the younger visionary proclaims ultimately is the imaginative and moral death of the older poet. It’s a chilling verdict, and the truth of it is not proven: we learn much more of what Shelley felt about Wordsworth than any details concerning the finer points of the failure and complacency he believed Wordsworth to have exemplified. Wordsworth was still some years from the pinnacle of success, respectability and poet laureateship, and the various charges of loss of inspiration other poets would later press. To Wordsworth remains effective in the slowly mustered forces of its sincerity and regret, and the emotional charge of the disappointment. “Deserting” his own songs (like a leader abandoning his troops) Wordsworth has left Shelley to grieve, “Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.” Shelley has in fact come to bury a poet he believes is already creatively, politically, dead on the battlefield of ideas.

The Secret Day

My yesterday has gone, has gone and left me tired,
And now tomorrow comes and beats upon the door;
So I have built To-day, the day that I desired,
Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more,
Lest comfort come no more.

So I have built To-day, a proud and perfect day,
And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands;
The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way;
The thyme, the velvet thyme, grew up beneath my hands,
Grew pink beneath my hands.

So I have built To-day, more precious than a dream;
And I have painted peace upon the sky above;
And I have made immense and misty seas that seem
More kind to me than life, more fair to me than love —
More beautiful than love.

And I have built a house — a house upon the brink
Of high and twisted cliffs; the sea’s low singing fills it;
And there my Secret Friend abides, and there I think
I’ll hide my heart away before tomorrow kills it
A cold tomorrow kills it.

Yes, I have built To-day, a wall against To-morrow,
So let To-morrow knock — I shall not be afraid,
For none shall give me death, and none shall give me sorrow,
And none shall spoil this darling day that I have made.
No storm shall stir my sea. No night but mine shall shade
This day that I have made.

This poem by the novelist, journalist and suffragist Stella Benson appears in her collection, Twenty, published in June 1918, shortly before the end of the first world war. (Some of her own reactions to the first world war are recorded here.) Benson (1892-1933) went to California that same year, largely because she was in poor health and her doctor had recommended the climate.

I imagine that most of Twenty had been put together before she embarked on her travels. The Secret Day may have emerged from her fears concerning the journey and her future in a strange country. Interestingly, it illustrates the psychological need to find a sanctuary in time rather than space. Benson is aware that the device is an artificial one, but launches a convincing appeal for its necessity, beautifully structured by the constant echoes of anaphora. She has “built To-day” (a day she was hoping to greet in another form) “Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more, / Lest comfort come no more.” Each stanza’s concluding line of trimeter is always effective, but never more than here, with its frank admission of the most basic animal need – for “comfort”.

In stanza two, the poet concedes the limits of her “building” metaphor, and creates a specific picture of an English coastal landscape, in which she conjures flowers instantly out of the earth. The day is now bigger than a stage-set, although Benson continues to highlight her original metaphor, as in the third stanza image of peace being “painted” on the sky, and the making of “immense and misty seas …”

Besides a separation from her country, there’s the implied rift with a “Secret Friend”. The capitalisation here seems a childish gesture. I don’t know how easily a female poet in 1918 could have solved the problem Benson has set herself, but some Imagist sidestepping might have been recommended. It would have helped her case for “Secret Friend” if she’d at least dropped the capitalisation.

Despite its moments of sentimentality, Benson’s poem doesn’t lack intensity and originality. The confessional tone of voice is effective. The speaker trusts the reader with her introspective project, in which simple diction and repetitions imply genuine candour and vulnerability. Do the hexameter lines provide a little too much space to fill? Here and there, perhaps, but at the same time, the rhythms add to the insistence of the speaker, the authority of her first-person account of things.

The closing trimeter line of the last stanza emphasises the pathos of her new metaphorical turn: she has built a wall, not a house, and her cherished “To-day” is already fading into nightfall, although the claim to sanctuary remains defiant.

Benson’s focus was primarily on fiction and journalism. It seems that Twenty was the only full collection of her poems to have been published during her lifetime. A late-awarded distinction is that two other Benson poems appear in Philip Larkin’s 1972 Oxford Anthology of 20th Century English Verse. (Perhaps this was at Monica Jones’s suggestion? But Larkin takes credit for agreeing!)

The new Adelaide festival board has issued a public apology to Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has promised she will be invited to Adelaide writers’ week in 2027.

Abdel-Fattah immediately accepted the apology, posting on Instagram that it was a vindication “of our collective solidarity and mobilisation against anti-Palestinian racism, bullying and censorship”.

She said she was still considering the board’s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.

In a statement on Thursday morning, Adelaide Festival Corporation acknowledged they had previously said they would exclude Abdel-Fattah from this year’s event “because it would be culturally insensitive to allow her to participate. We retract that statement”.

“We apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her. Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.”

The new chair of the Adelaide festival board, Judy Potter, also extended the apology to Louise Adler, who resigned as AWW director on Tuesday in protest of Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation.

“We acknowledge the principled stand she took in the extremely difficult decision to resign from her role as director,” Potter said.

“Louise is a revered figure of Australian literature who we hold in the highest regard. Her contributions to, and stewardship of, Adelaide Writers’ Week in the time she has been the Director (2023 – 2025) have been outstanding.”

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Potter confirmed there was no possibility of the 2026 AWW going ahead.

“We understand that many in the community are urging reconsideration of the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2026,” she said.

“While we fervently share that desire, our informed assessment of the situation is that it is simply no longer viable for it to proceed.”

The festival’s executive director, Julian Hobba, told reporters at a press conference on Thursday that the festival will still pay the fee writers would have received had their appearances not been cancelled. However, he said this would not be extended to those who voluntarily pulled out.

The apology comes after Tony Berg, a former board member and the former managing director of Macquarie Bank, issued a statement to the media accusing Adler and Abdel-Fattah of a “selective” and “utterly hypocritical” devotion to free speech.

Adler resigned on Tuesday over Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation, and later that day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation announced the cancellation of the 2026 writers’ festival.

But in the statement circulated by Berg this week, the Sydney businessman said he was “utterly astonished” at Adler’s claim she had resigned in the name of free speech, and at Abdel-Fattah’s “outrage at being ‘cancelled’”.

“They both exhibit hypocrisy in defending free speech for some, when I observed them both to stridently oppose free speech during my time on the board,” he said, referring to the 2024 incident when controversial New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was scheduled to appear but did not do so.

Ten academics, including Abdel-Fattah, had written to the festival board on 6 February 2024, requesting it rescind the invitation to Friedman, who had published a controversial column days earlier, which compared the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.

The festival board responded three days later in writing, telling the lobbying academics that requesting the board to cancel an artist or writer was “extremely serious”.

“We have an international reputation for supporting artistic freedom of expression,” the letter said, signed by the board’s chair, Tracey Whiting.

“Thomas L Friedman was programmed to contribute online from New York. However, I have been advised that due to last-minute scheduling issues, he is no longer participating in this year’s program.”

Berg said: “Adler led a demand to the board to retract an invitation to Tom Friedman to participate in the 2024 Adelaide Writers Week.

“After Tom Friedman was invited to speak, Randa Abdel-Fattah had led a group of academics demanding that Tom Friedman be deplatformed. Then Louise Adler, Ruth MacKenzie and Kath Mainland put an ultimatum to the Board that they would resign if it did not endorse their recommendation to disinvite Friedman. In the face of that threat, the board felt it had no alternative but to allow withdraw [sic] the invitation to Friedman.”

Berg said he understood why a number of authors [more than 170] had turned down invitations to come to AWW 2026 on freedom of speech grounds.

“But they should understand that the people with whom they are standing, in fact, have actively undermined freedom of speech in the past,” he said.

“Unlike Adler and Abdel-Fattah, I support free speech, not on a selective basis but with a range of views presented in respectful dialogue.”

Adler responded to Berg’s allegations by accusing the former board member of breaching board confidentiality.

“I consider discussions of the board table to be confidential,” she said in a prepared statement.

“I’m rather surprised that a former CEO of Macquarie Bank has breached those confidences. It’s indicative of the way the former board operated, and I believe will make for a rich case study for future management students.”

Abdel-Fattah disputed Berg’s claims that she, along with Adler, led the charge to cancel Friedman.

“I was one of 10 Indigenous and academics of colour who wrote a researched letter with references and footnotes about the harm of racial tropes,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.

“What is missing in this is the question of power. We write letters on Google Docs to boards. The people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.”

Adelaide festival has been approached for comment.

Abdel-Fattah announced on Wednesday she would be pursuing defamation action against the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, over comments he made earlier this week.

Abdel-Fattah said she would continue her defamation proceedings against Malinauskas on Thursday.

Since last Thursday, the South Australian premier has consistently denied any direct interference, insisting the board acted independently.

“However, when asked for my opinion I was happy to make it clear that the state government did not support the inclusion of Dr Abdel-Fattah on the Adelaide writers’ week program,” he said.

The premier said he was informed of the new board’s decision to apologise to Abdel-Fattah after that decision had been made on Wednesday. He said he did not agree with that decision.

“My position is consistent,” he said. “I thought it through very carefully before I made a decision, based on facts and principles, and the facts that informed my decision have now been proven … Other people can explain why they’ve changed their position.

“I certainly don’t feel the need to change mine. I’m in favour of inclusivity. I’m in favour of consistency, making sure that all voices are heard.”

The Greens arts spokesperson, senator Hanson Young, said the premier also had to apologise.

“Peter Malinauskas must also now apologise to Randa Abdel-Fattah, Louise Adler and the people of South Australia,” she said in a statement.

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?

Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.
Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubled
hearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has been
a bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother,
what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something
is always the matter, and not just for mothers.
(As I write this, the Angelus rings.) Every
character in Hamlet is troubled, there are
no monsters in it. I render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s — everything is
troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar
is troubled. I render unto God the things
that are God’s and feel — want to feel? Do feel —
that God is troubled. I also render unto art.
But I have no idea what art is. What
Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is. What
the luminous chaos of The Portrait of
a Lady is. What The Pilgrim’s Progress is.
My feet knew the way before I opened
the book: that just before the gate to heaven
is yet another hole to hell.

Richard W Halperin was born in Chicago to an Irish mother, and an American father with Russian ancestry. Early in his childhood the family moved to New York. He taught for a short period at Hunter College, and subsequently made a career in education administration, latterly with Unesco in Paris, where he currently lives.

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter? is from the New Poems section of All the Tattered Stars: Selected and New Poems published by Salmon Poetry in 2023 to celebrate Halperin’s 80th birthday.

The New York School’s influence is audible in his work’s refreshing lightness of texture. Halperin is deeply serious, though, about the function and power of art, cinema and the literary arts in particular. Considering the impact of a poem sequence by an unnamed writer, he says of their portrayal of daughterhood, “None of this is my experience, / All of it is my experience. / Don’t tell me I cannot be daughter.”

Hamlet’s address to his mother, Gertrude, which forms the current poem’s title, is freighted with his still-to-be-spoken accusation – of lechery and adultery with his uncle, Claudius, if not direct connivance in the murder of his father, King Hamlet. Halperin, abandoning quote marks or footnotes, cleverly escapes Shakespeare at the same time, and allows himself a little dry fun with the ideal of universality. The unanchored question inevitably sheds some of its specific complexity, and starts to look like a sentence a contemporary son or daughter might utter to a mother who is entirely innocent of the dangerous “matter” associated with Gertrude. Perhaps, as the child’s emphatic “Now” might suggest, this mother is overdoing some small complaint, and the words are uttered with mockery or exasperation rather than complete earnestness (though the latter isn’t impossible). Halperin’s artfully expanded context demonstrates the subjectivity of artistic interpretation.

His speaker goes on to renew, lightly, the seriousness associated with the original context. The near-euphemism “troubled hearts” suggests a complex perspective from which to read Hamlet’s mother and the play’s other characters – in fact, mothers and “others” in general. Hamlet, the play, has always been the speaker’s bridge between “life” and “art”, he says, since both are “for troubled hearts”. “Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother, / what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something / is always the matter, and not just for mothers.” Art permits self-recognition: it brings “troubled hearts” into an encounter with themselves.

This “matter” is gracefully expressed, with the interrupting comment from the Angelus bell pertinently timed. The Angelus marks the incarnation of Christ announced when the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary. It’s now that Halperin’s denial of there being any “monsters” in Hamlet makes a sharpened point. Art offers a route out of the judgmental “monsters v angels” binaries of religion, though not, of course, a route out of the problems of morality.

In the agreed obligation to Caesar, referencing Christ’s words from Matthew 22:21, Halperin projects himself into that imperial political scene and updates it: “I render unto Caesar / the things that are Caesar’s — everything is / troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar / is troubled. I render unto God the things / that are God’s and feel — want to feel? — do feel / that God is troubled. I also render unto art.”

Being “troubled” might be less of a guarantee of compassion than hoped. But the cleverly nervous enjambment that sustains a biblical and colloquial mix of register encourages tentative optimism.

As the speaker disarmingly confesses, he has “no idea what art is”. Art seems more demanding than any Caesar. The intransitive form of “render” in “I also render unto art” suggests more than self-giving service – the possibility of psychic “rending”, for example.

The three literary texts the speaker cites later seem random, but may have a common theme of pilgrimage, one that might stretch to include both the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer, and the poet Edward Thomas. The concept admits Halperin’s persona, too: “My feet knew the way before I opened / the book”. The mind is pre-patterned with the traditional techniques of storytelling. What the speaker unquestioningly knows is “that just before the gate to heaven / is yet another hole to hell.” That conclusion is surprising and suggests the unilluminable: then we remember the poet Dante, who illuminated the hell holes, too. Without irony, Halperin reveals the magnitude of the literary pilgrimage.

Drama and fiction, poetry and allegory, are consolidated by the last three lines; “troubled hearts” and “holes to hell” are always integral. To travel these worlds, without rejecting the human-ness of the misnamed demons and monsters, may be another foundational characteristic of literary art.

The director of Adelaide writers’ week, Louise Adler, has resigned after the board of the Adelaide festival announced it had dumped the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the literary event.

“I cannot be party to silencing writers, so with a heavy heart I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW,” said Adler, one of Australia’s most influential literary figures.

“Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us. We need writers now more than ever, as our media closes up, as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal.”

Adler announced her resignation in an opinion piece published in Guardian Australia on Tuesday. Since the board announced the cancellation of Abdel-Fattah’s appearance at the 2026 event, some 180 writers, commentators and academics have withdrawn, including the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, the bestselling author Zadie Smith, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Percival Everett and one of Australia’s most decorated writers, Helen Garner.

Abdel-Fattah previously faced sustained criticism from the Coalition, some Jewish bodies and media outlets for controversial comments about Israel, including alleging that Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety”.

Adler was highly critical of the board she had been working with for the 2026 event, her fourth since being appointed director of AWW in 2022. At the weekend that board shrank by more than half, with four of its seven voting members, including the chair, Tracey Whiting, resigning.

“The Adelaide festival board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – to disinvite … Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide writers’ week weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t,” she wrote, going on to condemn the board’s justification of community cohesion as the reason behind its decision to axe Abdel-Fattah.

“This is a managerialist term intended to stop thinking,” she said. “One doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of ‘social cohesion’ is propaganda.”

Adler also indicated that the decision was an example of a wider issue within Australian arts organisations, citing previous board decisions by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (the cancelling of a concert by the pianist Jayson Gillham), Creative Australia (the withdrawal and subsequent reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi to the 2026 Venice Biennale), and the collapse of the Bendigo writers’ festival.

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The column echoes concerns raised by 17 prominent cultural figures – who have all held senior leadership roles at Adelaide festival – in a letter to the festival’s board on Saturday.

Signatories included nine past artistic directors of the festival: Jim Sharman, Anthony Steel, Rob Brookman, Robyn Archer, Peter Sellars, Stephen Page, Paul Grabowsky, David Sefton and Neil Armfield. The director Barrie Kosky, who led the festival in 1996, has sent a separate letter to the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, and the arts minister, Andrea Michaels, demanding that Abdel-Fattah be reinstated to the writers’ week program.

The open letter condemned the board’s decision on Abdel-Fattah and challenged the SA government to appoint people with arts expertise to the board of one of Australia’s most internationally renowned cultural events.

“We note there are currently none,” the open letter said.

On Tuesday Abdel-Fattah called Adler’s resignation “a tragedy”, telling ABC Radio Adelaide that Adler was “one of the most incredible directors and icons in Australia’s cultural history”.

“What we have now is Louise Adler, a Jewish woman, an anti-Zionist Jewish woman, who has had to resign and step down from this festival,” she said. “It really shows you that in this moment her identity as a Jewish woman has been erased and this is an attack on me as a Palestinian and Louise Adler as an anti-Zionist Jewish woman.”

Abdel-Fattah rejected any suggestion she had made antisemitic comments in the past. “I have never, ever called for Jews to be unsafe,” she said, adding: “Zionism is not a racial or religious identity, it is a political ideology.”

In 2023 Adler was criticised for programming multiple Palestinian writers at AWW but argued that all authors had been invited based on their books, not their political opinions.

“People are free to deeply object,” she told Guardian Australia after AWW finished that year. “They don’t have to come. Or come, and you don’t need to agree with what people think.

“But people listened. These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”

At that 2023 event, Malinauskas admitted he had been under immense pressure to axe the funding for writers’ week but decided it would set a dangerous precedent if a government determined who was allowed to speak.

Adler pointed out in her resignation column that, in contrast to his 2023 position, the premier had publicly backed the decision to axe Abdel-Fattah. Malinauskas has denied he put any pressure on the festival board to withdraw the academic’s 2026 invitation.

A former publisher and the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, Adler has been a consistent defender of free speech, the right to criticise Israel and the right of Palestinians to speak freely, as other Australian arts leaders have wavered.

She is on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia. She is also a former editor of Australian Book Review, a former arts editor for the Age, a former presenter of ABC Radio National’s Arts Today program and a former president of the Australian Publishers Association. She has also worked as a publisher-at-large at Hachette and as the chief executive of Melbourne University Press.

Adler’s paternal grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her father joined the communist resistance in Paris aged 14, while her mother fled Nazi Germany with her parents in 1939, as their extended family was murdered by the Nazis.

Born in Melbourne, Adler studied in Israel, the UK and the US, where she was a postgraduate student of the Palestinian American academic Edward Said.

Speaking on the ABC’s 7.30 in 2023, Adler recalled being summoned to a private meeting with an Israeli ambassador in the 2000s after she reviewed Said’s memoirs and being ordered to “not air Israel’s dirty linen in public”.

“That was one of my early experiences of being told that we don’t talk about our criticism of Israel in the public sphere,” she said.

But, she said, her family’s history had inspired her stance on Palestine. “It is important and it is vital for us to not look away,” she said. “We all have a choice. The world looked away during the second world war and the Jews, six million of our people, were murdered in that looking away.

“And that it is incumbent upon humanity to look at what is happening in Gaza now and to say, ‘We will not accept this. We will say no, not in our name.’”