It’s 10 years this week since the culmination of a project Aidan Coleman and I ran in 2012, in which we invited South Australian poets to write about the renowned stained glass in St. Bart’s Church, Norwood, one of Adelaide’s oldest churches. Many of South Australia’s – and Australia’s – finest poets took up the challenge, 30 of them in all. The poems were showcased at a poetry reading at St. Bart’s in early November of that year, at which the poets read alongside the windows. A selection of the poems was anthologised in Light & Glorie (Pantaenus Press, 2012). The poems ranged from devotional to skeptical, from detailed to digressive, from the personal and aesthetic, to the historical. In the 10 years since, the newspaper articles about the project and two of the radio interviews have disappeared from their respective websites. But, happily, the Light & Glorie anthology is still available from Amazon, ABC Radio National’s hour-long podcast about the project is still online, and so are Robert Rath’s excellent photos of the poetry reading. Links below.
- Light & Glorie (Pantaenus Press, 2012)
- ABC Radio National ‘The Spirit of Things’ podcast, with images of the windows
- Robert Rath’s photos of the reading
Thom Sullivan 