Christopher Konrad

Chris has lived in Western Australia his whole life with forty of those years in the hills around Perth. Father and mother were Austrian migrants who moved to WA in the 1950’s. He is married with four children aged from 18 - 26 years.

Chris has had a varied working life - first as a tradesman Cabinet Maker completing an apprenticeship with his father. He changed career and worked for the last fifteen years in human services as a counsellor/educator/community development. Chris has had several articles published in journals to do with Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drug problems and education.

He has completed a Master Social Science and is currently undertaking PH.D in creative writing and has had poems published in Thirst , WetInk, Word is Out, Page 17, Prospect, Indigo, Westerly, Island, Staples and Varuna Piccaro Press Anthology and in the online publications PixelPapers , WA Poets, Creatrix, Swamp and Perigee.

Chris was published in an anthology with four other poets. Amber Contains the Sun was launched at the Perth Writers’ Festival early in 2009 and was funded by the Department of Culture and the Arts WA.

Shane McCauley comments on Chris’s poems in ‘Amber contains the Sun’ (2008)

Matters metaphysical are also pursued in the poems of Chris Konrad, though there is a constant awareness of quotidian reality as well. The two are brought startlingly together in ‘Saw a Man Falling’, in which the daydreaming cafe customer seems to see a ‘man falling from the sky’ and follows his trajectory in an intriguing demonstration of empathy. The daydreamer, and the reader, is left to interpret Konrad’s vision. Apart from poems that allude to history, science, mythology, art and literature, there is also a keen sense of place. He skilfully paints with words: ‘Silk sand creates miniature crab sculptures /casting long shadows’ (from Middleton Beach).
Chris Konrad, like his fellow poets, is fascinated by what can and cannot be expressed, the boundaries of the possible. He concludes ‘Vipassana Moment’ with ‘What I need to say/ held just between my lips.’

Chris won First prize in the Creatrix Poetry Prize 2009 (WA) for the poem Trakl and First Prize in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize 2009 (WA) for The Thaumaturge. Also received a Commended award in the Karen W Treanor Poetry Awards 2010 (WA) for Upon reading d.a.levy

Judge of Edith Cowan University Talus Poetry Competition 2010

I dreamed in a cafe, looked up

and saw a light headed cloud,

sun, edging its way past billowed edge:

saw a man falling from the sky.

Squinting, I followed him all the way down,

traced his trajectory unravelling

remembered a bucket full of stories

released by a dying man’s last gasp.

I held true to those memories

mesmerized

refused to let them go.

A falling man’s last thoughts

cannot save him and

I tried to grasp them

as I had tried to seize mine

as if they were a rope

able to halt an inevitable end.

No matter how hard I wished it otherwise

gravity played out its undeniable role

while I held my recollections,

bound by them in turn.

The falling man had to let go and free fall

leaving memories behind for an observer

to string together in a day dream cafe.

He speaks of a rope not hung high in the air but slung low to

to the ground, upon which one records not the sure step

but only the stumble, the falter... I had left a fracture in her permanence

in her otherwise perfect stride ... her perfume, a rupture in her digression



He said truth was a guillotine, sure and razor sharp, the final arbiter

and that sins falls from a tree ... it passes salt and pepper... it’s

a ghost in my rear view mirror ... it’s a boat buffeted in Matilda Bay



My faith in her was not corrupted because hope ... I know now

resided in buttered bread and the soup we ate in Portabello Cafe

and that suffering is a strand in the rope of truth ... the Way teaches me

a cyclone blasting into Derby ... it is the weather of the room in my chest



the sea of my feet and you resided there ... on that tight rope just above

the ground when we fell through arteries and a mile of blood

where my sin is a memory plague of winter days

in that room in my chest