Neurologists at Exeter University, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, found that reading poetry activated different brain regions to prose — even the lyrical prose we find in fiction. When...

One of the most memorable pieces of wildlife footage aired in any David Attenborough documentary is of an Australian native songbird, the superb lyrebird, doing its thing in a patch of scrub.

Its extraordinary to think how swiftly our lives have been upended by coronavirus. Rewind the calendar a few months and we were spending our Saturday mornings having breakfast at cafes, or turning up...

This weeks poem is by Jill Jones, an acclaimed, prolific poet who has written, at my count, 11 full-length collections of poetry during the past 28 years and a number of other chapbooks to boot....

In the late great John Forbess Lessons for Young Poets — a poem that masquerades as a po-faced set of instructions for aspiring bards, served with a hefty salting of irony — Forbes reflects on the...

I measure every grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes, Emily Dickinson wrote, I wonder if It weighs like Mine Or has an Easier size.

These days, I find myself acutely aware of borders and boundaries. Everywhere, rigid lines have replaced permeable, flexible ones: the lines between nations and states, of course, but also those...

The great Irish poet Eavan Boland, who died on April 27, once observed that when female poets seek to write about motherhood, they are met with a dilemma: there is a category of experience and...

Like many apartment-dwellers, I have found myself gazing out of windows more often during the past few months of confinement. In the morning, I track the movement of the clouds and sun in the...

Why do poets still turn to poetic forms in the age of free verse Its a question you could be forgiven for asking. At first blush, forms may seem inimical to the liberating impulse of art. Poetic...

While it was TS Eliot who famously described poetry as not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality, it was the great Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who achieved this...

As of this week its winter in the southern hemisphere, which means its also the beginning of summer north of the equator. For many Australians, historically it has been the ideal time to plan a visit...

One of the most exciting developments in Australian poetry during the past decade has been the increasing numbers of diasporic and migrant poets publishing collections with mainstream poetry imprin...

Compute, O friend, the number of the oxen of the sun: so begins one of the oldest extant poems about mathematics, composed by Greek mathematician and philosopher Archimedes in the third century BC....

In 1851, in Hyde Park, London, a shimmering, phantasmagorical glasshouse was constructed at the behest of Queen Victorias consort, Prince Albert. Made of iron and millions of panes of glass, and half...