Jade Rosina McCutcheon
A semi retired theatre director and professor Jade has been living in Oregon for five years and her poetry has been published in Australian poetry journals such as SCARP, ‘Leaves’ and ‘Wiradjuri’ as well as in 'Terra Incognita' (Bob Hill publishing 2019, Oregon). 'Fair Art' won second place in the Kay Snow Awards 2019 and 'Australian Bush Solstice' won runner up in the Kay Snow Awards 2018. Jade’s first chapbook 'Small Feather' will be published by Finishing Line Press this September.
The photo to the left is from the play 'Elephant's Graveyard' written and directed by Jade at The studio, Mondavi Centre for the Performing Arts in Davis, CA.
Radio Interview with Jade, KMUZ, Oregon. 2020.
Interviewed by Steve Slemenda.
Have a listen.
SMALL FEATHER
September 05, 2020
In Jade Rosina McCutcheon’s first published collection, we encounter an art fair that “arrives / in hottentot orange heat / and settles like a peacock / feather on an emerald field”; we observe a bag woman who gathers “galaxy dust / bag by bag”; and we contemplate a woman at a Melbourne train station who waits “for a / spirit beast / or a medicine woman / to follow the tracks / on her arm / make sense / of her life.” The imaginative poems in this debut chapbook give us a first
sample of McCutcheon’s penchant for striking and often surreal imagery. Here, words call to us, evoking “a madrigal circus of apricots / dressed as sirens / in the distance.”
—Paulann Petersen
Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
Order your copy today from Finishing Line Press.
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/small-feather-by-jade-rosina-mccutcheon/
Jade Rosina McCutcheon
Australian Bush Solstice
We party on the new pine deck
launch forth our summer joy
sautéed in garlic ginger echoes
bathed in Joni Mitchell’s chords.
The bush is loud, hysterical
Kookaburras spilling riot-red laughter
silent kangaroos
grazing, listening.
Our revelry bounces off full moon light
flashes between stampeding clouds
as a summer storm excites the air
crackling the blue-green gums.
Party into jasmine-mango
barbequed prawns drinking yeasty
bubbles watching clockwork spiders
spin yarns.
Then a moment lily still
paparazzi moonlight catches us
faces uplifted
silhouette stenciled
into lavender summer night.
Jade Rosina McCutcheon
Honorary mention, Kay Snow Awards 2018.
