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    The Taste of River Water: new and selected poems
    The Taste of River Water: new and selected poems
    The Taste of River Water: new and selected poems
    Ebook87 pages31 minutes

    The Taste of River Water: new and selected poems

    By Cate Kennedy

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    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS C.J. DENNIS PRIZE FOR POETRY

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PREMIER'S BOOK AWARDS

    Disarming, warm, and always accessible, Cate Kennedy’s poems make ordinary experiences glow. Everything that suffuses her well-loved prose is here: compassion, insight, lyrical precision, and the clear, minimalist eye that reveals how life can turn on a single moment. Musing on the undercurrents and interconnections between legacy, memory, motherhood, and the natural world, the poems in this exhilarating collection begin on the surface and then take us, gracefully and effortlessly, to a far more thought-provoking place. Grounded in lived experience, with all its mysteries and consolations, they resonate with a passionate, sensuous honesty.

    PRAISE FOR CATE KENNEDY

    ‘Kennedy writes fine poetry ... marvellous.’ The Age

    ‘Pack[s] an emotional punch. Kennedy excels at drawing extraordinary details out of the seemingly mundane minutiae of everyday life, with a sharp, focused eye for the politics of the personal. Her depictions of rural life and the Australian landscape are particularly evocative. It's a welcome addition to the often-underrated canon of Australian poetry.’ The Herald Sun

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribe Publications
    Release dateMay 2, 2011
    ISBN9781921753787
    The Taste of River Water: new and selected poems
    Author

    Cate Kennedy

    Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely. Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. She lives on a secluded bend of the Broken River in north-east Victoria.

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    Reviews for The Taste of River Water

    4/5

    354 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      An interesting basic overview of what we currently know about how the brain processes information and learns.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating! A great book for those laymen (like moi) interested in Brain science and the implications on learning. The chapters on music and gender are especially good.
    • 4/5
      My advisor for grad school gave me this book as a graduation present. As a researcher, I have read about many of these studies but it was still interesting and engaging. I highly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      An amazing book on the brain. The book is highly readable and interesting.
    • 3/5
      Interesting, useful, practical.
    • 4/5
      Excellent, down to earth way that we can make simple Life Hacks with discoveries regarding how the Brain works. Best tips are - exercise is crucial!! naps are important for creativity and high Brain functioning; teaching and probably also preaching should only last for 10min increments; and lastly what we smell while learning can greatly enhance our retention and learning speed. Medina's downside is he breaks down things so much that it lack an air of academic rigor. If Brain Rules could be combined with Brain Fix you'd have a masterpiece.
    • 4/5
      This is a great book. It combines brain science with evolution, how people learn and the stupidities of how we teach. It took me a long time to actually read, but in the process I gave two presentations on the basic principles and gifted the book to a couple of different people.

      I think it is a good book to read for many reasons:
      -understanding how your children are developing
      -understanding how to approach people and how their brain affects their reaction
      -understanding the basic way your brain works so that you can leverage that knowledge
      etc.

      The above, of course, assumes that what the book says is correct. I choose to think it is and think that the concepts it provides can be very useful in managing staff and working with people in general.
    • 4/5
      Short, but informative and engaging. I appreciate that Medina explains the biology clearly, tries not to generalize too much (even the "principles" of the title are more suggestions and ideas for future research), and emphasizes that there is so much about the brain that we still don't understand. This would be too basic for those who already know some neuroscience, but for me it was about right.
    • 4/5
      Good highly readable reference to the latest in brain research. Well worth the read, even you won't remember all 12 principles later. (And there is probably a principle in the book that would explain why.)
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully thorough and accessible! Medina presents complicated data and concepts in an engaging manner and supports his ideas with examples and stories designed to maximize recall. I loved reading this book and anticipate that I'll be referencing it often!
    • 3/5
      I'd rate this a 3.5I found it an interesting and educational read. I liked how the book was organized and how it was explained in terms I understood.Many of the principles, to me, felt rather self-explanatory but at the same time they were put in way that told me things I didn't know about the topic.I enjoyed reading it.
    • 5/5
      Although the brain often seems to be the most overlooked tool in trainer-teacher-learners' toolkits, great writers like developmental molecular biologist John Medina are doing a lot to move us past that that oversight through books like "Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School." Medina is never less than completely engaging, and his 12 rules about how the brain functions in learning are drawn from well-documented research, his own very funny observations, and his continual call for more research to help fill in the numerous gaps we still have in our knowledge: "This book is a call for research simply because we don't know enough to be prescriptive," he disarmingly admits (p. 4). Among the rules he documents: exercise boosts brain power; every brain is wired differently; stressed brains don't learn well; and stimulate more of the senses simultaneously to stimulate more effective learning. This is not a book for those comfortable with the status quo; in fact, Medina clearly expects us to approach his work with minds completely open to ideas that might initially strike us as ludicrous. And he encourages us to imagine (and create) learning spaces that inspire and sustain curiosity as opposed to the age-old model of lecture halls where learning is an instructor-centric endeavor.
    • 4/5
      Briliant. I use stuff from this every day (that I remember to). I read about half of this then left it for a while then read a chapter that I was most interested in then I re-read the whole.
    • 5/5
      Brain Rules is an excellent overview of some key principles to optimize your brain's performance. Medina does a great job of mixing the science behind how your brain works with practical takeaways. While there is a lot of science discussed, Medina manages to present the information in a very engaging and easily digestible format.There are so many things we should be doing to optimize our cognitive abilities at work and in the classroom that are currently being ignored for the sake of tradition. The adjustments sometimes sound fairly radical (Medina proposes that companies should block out 1/2 hour each day for employees to nap for example) but they are also fairly simple to execute, and well supported by scientific evidence of their potential impact.This should be a must read for anyone in business or education.
    • 4/5
      I learned about this book from Garr Reynolds' website. Medina's storytelling approach worked well for me & many of the principles are relevant to my work. Like some other reviewers, I'd like to know more about the science behind the stories.
    • 4/5
      A very humorus read about our brains!
    • 4/5
      An unusual book - not exactly pop science, not exactly self-help, not business, yet it has some of the flavor of all three. There is a companion web site, and at times you get the sense that this material would work better in a different format or combination of formats - and maybe that's what the web site helps accomplish. Since a couple of the "Rules" are "vision trumps all other senses" and "we don't pay attention to boring things", a book with no pictures seems a bit incongruous. And the rules are not prescriptive, but rather suggestive. Medina readily admits, maybe too readily, that almost all of these rules need more research. So, what are we to do with these rules. Maybe to do the "exploration" that is the basis of rule 12 and find out for ourselves.
    • 4/5
      I learned about this book from Garr Reynolds' website. Medina's storytelling approach worked well for me & many of the principles are relevant to my work. Like some other reviewers, I'd like to know more about the science behind the stories.

    Book preview

    The Taste of River Water - Cate Kennedy

    Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

    PO Box 523

    Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054

    Email: info@scribepub.com.au

    First published by Scribe 2011

    Copyright © Cate Kennedy 2011

    All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers and the author of this book.

    Some of these poems have been previously published:

    ‘How to eat a guava’ in Signs of Other Fires (Five Islands Press); and ‘Joy flight’, ‘Picasso’s portrait of a young woman’, ‘Mud wasps’, ‘The Poor Commissioners’, ‘Thinking the room empty’, ‘Love and work’, ‘Making a path’ and ‘Namaste’ in Joyflight (Interactive Press).

    National Library of Australia

    Cataloguing-in-Publication data

    Kennedy, Cate.

    The Taste of River Water.

    9781921753787 (e-book.)

    A821.4

    This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

    www.scribepublications.com.au

    Here, there is no edge for cutting, and no garde for avanting, there is only the same old story, fresh as resurrection

    — Kristin Henry, ‘This story’

    Contents

    Letter (1)

    I

    Thinking the room empty

    Joy flight

    Picasso’s portrait of a young woman

    Almost drowning

    How to eat a guava

    Mud wasps

    Binaries

    Making a path

    Locusts arrive in the city

    How to play Marineboy

    8 x 10 colour enlargements $16.50

    After the deconsecration

    Last man standing

    The Poor Commissioners

    Suspect

    Namaste

    Quiet

    II

    Eating earth

    Taproot

    Windburn

    Love and work

    Knothole

    The shortest day of the year

    Snow

    Breath

    Colostrum

    The taste of river water

    The test shows positive

    Like a storm

    Thank you

    The Zen master

    Dawn service

    Swimming class

    III

    Requeening

    Temporality

    The blessing of the ring

    Makeover

    October 14th, 2010: the Chilean miners are lifted into the light

    Letter (2)

    Letter (1)

    At college, we practised sound editing on reel-to-reels,

    doctoring famous speeches with a razor blade and tape,

    slicing out silences and stumbles

    from our own garrulous recordings of each other.

    Stuck to the table edge would be a dangling fringe of pieces,

    ready to be spliced together:

    sometimes a long eloquent sentence,

    sometimes just a useful, crisp connective,

    an and or so you see ...

    and a box of the out-takes:

    tongue-tied throat clearings,

    clicks, coughs, suppressed laughter,

    the thick dead air between pronouncements

    as we lost our thread, rattled by the microphone.

    I find I’ve carried it with me,

    this box of shining, static fragments,

    along with a roll of editing tape

    and the endless sifting and fossicking required

    to join each small piece together into a single sequence

    ribboning through the spool like a narrow dark river.

    Turns out I’ve saved each mortifying, blurting hesitation,

    starting and restarting,

    the ragged edge, imperfectly cut and joined

    making a sound like someone swallowing.

    So I snatch moments to do this:

    incising one piece

    and bending to the screen again,

    frowning, coffee in hand,

    to select another —

    they’re lined up faithfully here somewhere —

    I’ve lost my

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