Robbie Coburn

Robbie Coburn Poems

Robbie Coburn Biography

Robbie Coburn is a poet based in Melbourne, Australia. His books include Ghost Poetry (Upswell Publishing,2024) , And I Could Not Have Hurt You (Kiddiepunk,2023) , and The Other Flesh (UWA Publishing,2019) . Robert Adamson wrote that Coburn's poems " come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence" . His poems have been published in Poetry, Meanjin, Island, Westerly, and elsewhere, and anthologised in books including Writing to the Wire (UWA Publishing,2016) and To End All Wars (Puncher & Wattmann,2018) . Additionally, Coburn's haiku has been published widely, including in Modern Haiku, The Heron's Nest, NOON: Journal of the Short Poem, and Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America. His work was selected for inclusion in a hole in the light: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2018, edited by Jim Kacian, and under the same moon: Fourth Australian Haiku Anthology. Coburn has given featured readings at The Wheeler Centre and La Mama Poetica and has appeared as a guest at literary festivals including the Sydney Writers' Festival, Canberra Writers Festival, Newcastle Writers Festival and Perth Poetry Festival. He has also run poetry workshops for youth mental health organisation headspace. He released the album Womb (Pale Ghoul Recordings) , a collaboration with noise artist TVISB, in 2023. Born in June 1994, Coburn grew up on his family's farm in Woodstock, Victoria.)

The Best Poem Of Robbie Coburn

Suicide Country

Been here too long, have to get out
the fear that beats into you
living in the country remains with you long after you've gone
becoming a second skin dislodged when away from the grasses

a part of the body embedded in endless paddocks
from the beginning, the greater years convene
at the point of youth
threads of a silence beckoning you nearer-

the farmland has it's own language, the voice of dirt you numb with drink,
with marks along your flesh that never heal, only press deeper

you learn too late, never escaping the clean wind
inside the fence-lines, the property's border
fleeing from all you know to be consuming

to get out, take a rifle from the shed and do away
with the isolation for good, is all you can dream of
where the air stands in place of buildings,
with no-one new to see
freedom becomes intolerable
that's why more people die by their own hand
in the country than in the cold city

everyone is somehow absent of themselves
when isolation is your company,
the quiet land without immersion

the road out of town that rises beneath cars
leaving the country for the city
your feet never miss the paddocks,
though still a tension between the outside
and the openness.

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