Magic. Love. The supernatural. TV.  Issue five features poetry you’ll want to read and re-read, tiny Sydney Opera Houses best experienced from a variety of angles. And the ideal place to get a new perspective on one poem is often from an entirely different one.  Some of the poems here seem to reach out in the dark for one other, while others look headlong into it.

      There’s no theme to this or any other issue of berlin lit, but if there were, ‘Instructions for the Glimpse’ (the title of a poem by Carrie Etter) would be a likely candidate. Issue five is full of poems doing what poetry does best: guiding us in how to see rather than merely what to see. Or they express the desire to see more clearly, as in Fiona Larkin’s ‘O Oracle’:  ‘Rip away these bands / from my eyes and mouth’.

      To force my metaphor to its breaking point: like the Sydney Opera House, this issue plays host to a variety of dramas—sex, death, conflict, romance. It also has a fantastic cast of characters, ranging from the biblical in Richard O’Brien’s  ‘In The Idol Hours’, the Muppets in Rebecca McCutcheon’s ‘Camilla’, and the supernatural in Ian Harker’s ‘The Dagg Poltergeist’. I love it when a poet uses our shared stories, be they ancient or televisual, to help us see something we’ve always sensed but couldn’t locate; an idea that had been waiting for the right poem to draw it out of the shade. This itself is a kind of magic, which, as Jon Stone writes in ‘What’s First Learned of Magic is Later Learned of Love’,  ‘tumbles from its nest. It forms droplets on the bathroom mirror. Sometimes it is gone for a furiously long time.’ 

      As the nights in the northern hemisphere grow longer, and the world over is confronted by so many forms of darkness, I find myself thinking of this phrase from ‘Summer Solstice’ by Helen Calcutt:

      Until that dark sky within us
      notices the dark sky.

      Matthew McDonald