Lismore has a lot of cultural elements, and one of those, poetry, is celebrating a high point with two known local poets releasing books this Thursday at See Space in South Lismore.

Sarah Temporal and Vince Stead are holding an event this week to commemorate the occasion and make their voices heard.

Sarah is releasing her first book at the Vocable Poetry Event later this week. This project has taken 4 or 5 years in the making.

“I'm thrilled about the poems that are now really beautifully laid out on the page with a very elegant type setting that really goes with the fairy tale themes in the book," Sarah said.

“The whole thing takes about 18 months from getting that exciting acceptance email from the publisher to actually having the book in your hands.”

The name of the book, Tight Bindings, is reflective of navigating life, “It's about the darkness and the light of the bonds between people, families, the stories that we bind ourselves to, that we try and break free of, as well as those kind of bindings that really keep us whole and fill us up. The people in our lives that we really treasure.

“There's a lot of different stories in the book, it does cover quite a large part of my life. And so there are sort of stories of birth, debt, death, sex, illness, desire, a whole bunch of feminist reclaimed fairy tales.

“I think that it was really about working through these big questions and life transitions that had made their way into poems. The style of the poetry is also quite diverse. 

“I mucked around with a lot of spoken word styles as well as kind of confessional poetry, which suits me very well, because I like to imagine that I'm kind of telling secrets to somebody that I really trust.”

(In the first part of Sarah's book, there is a lot of introspection in what she calls her “personal confessional poems”.)

Sarah's book includes QR codes that link to performance videos, “I'm primarily a performance poet, and this book brings together about ten years worth of work- some performance and some page poetry, and to make it a multimedia product, where it connects with that part of my practice is really exciting.”

The accessibility for the performance aspect will be open to all, “It is important to me because I work with a lot of teenagers and young writers and emerging writers, some may find that purchasing new books is out of range.”

Sarah enjoys it when people read the book and reflect on how they can see themselves in the poems, “That's really humbling, and I wasn't necessarily prepared for those kinds of reactions.”

“The last part of the book is a suite of reclaimed fairy tales. In the middle is kind of the junk drawer of the collection. I put things that didn't fit in either of the others. I called it singing, and that's because so much of my practice does come from sound and the spoken voice rather than things written down.”

Covid was the catalyst for Sarah starting to put her works together for a book, “It was just a nice kick up the butt to make me sit down at my desk and go, Okay, time to go through all these poems and put them into a collection.

 “But I think what actually gave me the courage to write it was that I'd become a mum about a year before and had a baby at home. Somewhere in that big life transition, you lose a lot of self doubt and just, and just go for it.”

Despite being “sleep deprived”, the “experiences of embodiment” won out, and the works were collated.

“I have some poems in there about meeting my life partner, now my husband, who was very unwell with cystic fibrosis at the time that we met. I considered those questions: if you're only going to be with someone for a short time, then are they still the person to be with?“

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Sarah is excited to be featured at Vocable (this Thursday), “a wonderful grassroots poetry night in Lismore”. It is an open mike night, but Sarah and Vince will be a large part of the festivities. There is an innovative performance style that combines visual imagery with the works.

“It means so much to us to have audiences showing up and supporting our work, and even if you know buying a book isn't isn't possible, to have people there listening and taking it in is, yeah, really, really super for us.”

Vocable Details:

Thursday, the 21st of November

6:45pm at See Space

23 - 25 New Bridge Street, Lismore.