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Ghost Poetry
“I saved the pieces of you when you fell apart”
Robert Adamson wrote that Robbie Coburn’s poems “come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence”.
Largely set within stark farmland and surreal, nightmarish dreams, Coburn’s new collection of poems, Ghost Poetry, is haunted by depression, trauma, addiction, memory, regret, and the spectre of mutilation and violence inflicted on the human body, accompanied by the desire to leave.
But through this, there is always the process of the poet writing; an act that both dissects and preserves experience and suffering, but ultimately creates an engine of survival (to quote Leonard Cohen).
Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.
Robert Adamson wrote that Robbie Coburn’s poems “come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence”.
Largely set within stark farmland and surreal, nightmarish dreams, Coburn’s new collection of poems, Ghost Poetry, is haunted by depression, trauma, addiction, memory, regret, and the spectre of mutilation and violence inflicted on the human body, accompanied by the desire to leave.
But through this, there is always the process of the poet writing; an act that both dissects and preserves experience and suffering, but ultimately creates an engine of survival (to quote Leonard Cohen).
Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published January 3, 2024
2 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
Robbie Coburn
33 books76 followersRobbie Coburn is an Australian poet and young adult author. His debut YA verse novel The Foal in the Wire (Lothian Children’s Books, 2025) was shortlisted for the 2026 Young Adult Indie Book Award.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 18, 2024
A raw and unflinching collection that delves into the intricacies of the human experience. Absolutely phenomenal.
April 28, 2024
Deeply personal and raw, this collection is catharsis made by and into words. A moody, mourning book that gives you shivers. I had the pleasure of having met Coburn several years ago at a poetry workshop, and his encouragement for turning pain into poetry incited my own use of catharsis via poetry.
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April 8, 2024Robbie Coburn’s knowledge and love of horses is evident in his new poetry collection Ghost Poetry. It’s not only the striking close-up of a horse’s profile on the cover, or the many poems about horses which explore physical qualities of an animal simultaneously powerful and subservient, but also in the way horses function throughout the book as symbols, sometimes for life and virility and sometimes the unconscious with its deep well of pain and desire. Coburn’s writing manages the transition between the visceral and the philosophical so well that what is physical often will slide into the emotional or the symbolic seamlessly, blurring the lines between the two.
Although the writing is assured and ambitious, taking on big topics with confidence, Ghost Poetry is a delicate and vulnerable book, contrasting pain and fear with an instinctive imperative to live – a cry of defiance against the ever-present lure of suicidal ideation. This theme, in conjunction with the many references to horses, conjures Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and especially Plath’s “Ariel”, a poem which pivots around the image of a horse. As with “Ariel”, Coburn leans into the pain of depression and addiction, focusing it through the lens of the dream experience and playing with what these traumas might mean. It might sound dark, and the poems don’t shirk from exploring self-destructive anguish, but there is an exuberant energy even at the darkest moments. Perhaps this is created through the exhilaration of galloping across a country with its big sky and open spaces – the striving of wild horses for freedom.
The book is divided into three sections, “Blood Ritual”, “Wreck”, and “Straw Horses” each of a similar length with 18-20 poems. “Blood Ritual” and “Wreck” both contain the section title poem second, highlighting the role of the title poem as an anchor. “Blood Ritual” occurs just after “Ghost Poetry”, which creates a conversation of sorts between the two title poems – one that unites the sections and the one that separates them. “Ghost Poetry” the poem is one of my favourites in the book – a rich, powerful metapoem that invites the reader in calling attention to its own poetic construct, and setting up the themes of journeys, dreams or nightmares, pain and redemption through judicious spacing and a jagged rhythm:
I will be the ghost who dreams of you
until our eyes collide.
there is no map in my flesh, no doorways or windows.
No spurred heart of bruise throat when we touch.
When set next to “Blood Ritual”, the connection of the missing map with “the inconceivable weight/of a book bound in flesh” becomes clear. As with the rendering of horses, there’s a connection between the physical and the emotional that calls upon the reader who is cast in the role of collaborator and observer:
“I saved the pieces of you
when you fell apart.”
the deepening puncture
of my fingers against paper,
writing.
The landscapes in Ghost Poetry are familiar ones. Coburn’s country Victoria features prominently with its farm paddocks and pine trees. There is a comfortable sense of belonging that is woven through these poems, but there is also strangeness. This is the shadow space of dreams where bushfires destroy landscape, hospitals replace fields, stillborn foals lay in formerly bucolic settings and bodily torture replaces care so that the notion of what is real and what is memory/dream becomes subverted. There is a tenderness towards the body even as it is being deliberately hurt, edges blurring between subject and object, the self and other:
You stand me before the mirror;
I see your hands
taking hold of my face
and shaping the skin,
moulding me into a stranger (“Dream of Recovery”)
Though horses are present throughout the book, the second part, “Wreck”, is particularly horse rich. Horses appear in many forms, burnt in a paddock after bushfires, falling, giving birth, running as wild brumbies, screaming against constraints on a carousel, or exerting ghostly pressure as buried horse bones. These horses are both in the moment, real animals, and symbolic, reflecting both the flow of time and timelessness:
remember we would wish time was not illusory
and not drenched in all the lives we had lived before
the unforgiving landscape where time buried us
In the whitening night air. (“Rodeo”)
The title poem in “Wreck” uses the horse’s might as an extended metaphor of human violence, trauma and abuse:
I hear their frantic braying
as they crush my paper bones
in front of your eyes.
The final section, “Straw Horses”, extends the exploration of loss, addiction and trauma, with the creative process as a force for regeneration and hope. There is an elemental quality to the work in this section – the way rain becomes a connective tissue for example:
I told you the rain, like love,
was reaching us both at this distance.
that it was the same rain.
that it meant our bodies could wake
and start again. (“Dream of rain”)
The connection here between humans and horses is subtler than in previous sections, with blurred boundaries and animorphism:
I would like to be like the sun, faceless and distant again,
burning unbridled inside the sky’s ceiling and braying silently
a long night in a city bar tried across the paddock’s edge
and forever returning to try again. (“Horse of God”)
The title poem makes expert use of repetition and anaphora to create a driving rhythm that feels like mournful, like an invocation – or a way of bringing back someone or something no longer present:
forgive the unchanging dawn
forgive the burning rain.
forgive the horses colliding
with your childlike flesh
Ghost Poetry is a poetry collection that converts anguish and sadness into a creative power. There is suffering throughout the book, but the strength that underpins the pain is unmistakable, like a wild horse “burning unbridled inside the sky’s ceiling” exerting its will to live. Robbie Coburn has created a powerful and moving collection that will appeal to readers of all kinds, but for those who have experienced depression this is a book that will resonate deeply.
Although the writing is assured and ambitious, taking on big topics with confidence, Ghost Poetry is a delicate and vulnerable book, contrasting pain and fear with an instinctive imperative to live – a cry of defiance against the ever-present lure of suicidal ideation. This theme, in conjunction with the many references to horses, conjures Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and especially Plath’s “Ariel”, a poem which pivots around the image of a horse. As with “Ariel”, Coburn leans into the pain of depression and addiction, focusing it through the lens of the dream experience and playing with what these traumas might mean. It might sound dark, and the poems don’t shirk from exploring self-destructive anguish, but there is an exuberant energy even at the darkest moments. Perhaps this is created through the exhilaration of galloping across a country with its big sky and open spaces – the striving of wild horses for freedom.
The book is divided into three sections, “Blood Ritual”, “Wreck”, and “Straw Horses” each of a similar length with 18-20 poems. “Blood Ritual” and “Wreck” both contain the section title poem second, highlighting the role of the title poem as an anchor. “Blood Ritual” occurs just after “Ghost Poetry”, which creates a conversation of sorts between the two title poems – one that unites the sections and the one that separates them. “Ghost Poetry” the poem is one of my favourites in the book – a rich, powerful metapoem that invites the reader in calling attention to its own poetic construct, and setting up the themes of journeys, dreams or nightmares, pain and redemption through judicious spacing and a jagged rhythm:
I will be the ghost who dreams of you
until our eyes collide.
there is no map in my flesh, no doorways or windows.
No spurred heart of bruise throat when we touch.
When set next to “Blood Ritual”, the connection of the missing map with “the inconceivable weight/of a book bound in flesh” becomes clear. As with the rendering of horses, there’s a connection between the physical and the emotional that calls upon the reader who is cast in the role of collaborator and observer:
“I saved the pieces of you
when you fell apart.”
the deepening puncture
of my fingers against paper,
writing.
The landscapes in Ghost Poetry are familiar ones. Coburn’s country Victoria features prominently with its farm paddocks and pine trees. There is a comfortable sense of belonging that is woven through these poems, but there is also strangeness. This is the shadow space of dreams where bushfires destroy landscape, hospitals replace fields, stillborn foals lay in formerly bucolic settings and bodily torture replaces care so that the notion of what is real and what is memory/dream becomes subverted. There is a tenderness towards the body even as it is being deliberately hurt, edges blurring between subject and object, the self and other:
You stand me before the mirror;
I see your hands
taking hold of my face
and shaping the skin,
moulding me into a stranger (“Dream of Recovery”)
Though horses are present throughout the book, the second part, “Wreck”, is particularly horse rich. Horses appear in many forms, burnt in a paddock after bushfires, falling, giving birth, running as wild brumbies, screaming against constraints on a carousel, or exerting ghostly pressure as buried horse bones. These horses are both in the moment, real animals, and symbolic, reflecting both the flow of time and timelessness:
remember we would wish time was not illusory
and not drenched in all the lives we had lived before
the unforgiving landscape where time buried us
In the whitening night air. (“Rodeo”)
The title poem in “Wreck” uses the horse’s might as an extended metaphor of human violence, trauma and abuse:
I hear their frantic braying
as they crush my paper bones
in front of your eyes.
The final section, “Straw Horses”, extends the exploration of loss, addiction and trauma, with the creative process as a force for regeneration and hope. There is an elemental quality to the work in this section – the way rain becomes a connective tissue for example:
I told you the rain, like love,
was reaching us both at this distance.
that it was the same rain.
that it meant our bodies could wake
and start again. (“Dream of rain”)
The connection here between humans and horses is subtler than in previous sections, with blurred boundaries and animorphism:
I would like to be like the sun, faceless and distant again,
burning unbridled inside the sky’s ceiling and braying silently
a long night in a city bar tried across the paddock’s edge
and forever returning to try again. (“Horse of God”)
The title poem makes expert use of repetition and anaphora to create a driving rhythm that feels like mournful, like an invocation – or a way of bringing back someone or something no longer present:
forgive the unchanging dawn
forgive the burning rain.
forgive the horses colliding
with your childlike flesh
Ghost Poetry is a poetry collection that converts anguish and sadness into a creative power. There is suffering throughout the book, but the strength that underpins the pain is unmistakable, like a wild horse “burning unbridled inside the sky’s ceiling” exerting its will to live. Robbie Coburn has created a powerful and moving collection that will appeal to readers of all kinds, but for those who have experienced depression this is a book that will resonate deeply.
February 16, 2024
Ghost Poetry by Robbie Coburn lives up to its name. This collection of poetry is haunting and captivating in equal measure. It is a collection of dark poetry that touches on the murkiest corners of life but ultimately it is a story of survival against the want to leave this earth.
This collection will pick at the scabs of wounds you had forgotten were still raw as it covers pain, self harm, addiction trauma and the shame and regret that comes with living in what is seen by society to be a flawed mind.
Coburn beautifully weaves farm life into the metaphors, he particularly depicts horses in his poetry so clearly, you can hear hoofs cantering across the paddocks in your mind.
This truly was a spectacular read, even in all its darkest glory. It is strange to speak of something on these topics as beautiful but survival is a beautiful thing and that's all any of us are trying your do in this life.
I would absolutely recommend this to anyone, but please be mindful if you are triggered easily by certain topics.
This collection will pick at the scabs of wounds you had forgotten were still raw as it covers pain, self harm, addiction trauma and the shame and regret that comes with living in what is seen by society to be a flawed mind.
Coburn beautifully weaves farm life into the metaphors, he particularly depicts horses in his poetry so clearly, you can hear hoofs cantering across the paddocks in your mind.
This truly was a spectacular read, even in all its darkest glory. It is strange to speak of something on these topics as beautiful but survival is a beautiful thing and that's all any of us are trying your do in this life.
I would absolutely recommend this to anyone, but please be mindful if you are triggered easily by certain topics.
December 30, 2024
Regretfully, by the fifth poem about horses, the motif runs stale.
I will be the first to admit that many of these poems indicated a strong control over language, a capacity to understand poetic form, and a dedication to crafting a poem that felt 'complete'.
However, the main gripe I had with this collection was that it felt like a chapbook extended into an entire collection. Most of these poems had no place being here.
For instance, I have no issue with poems speaking to an environment, a society, a place, a location. I think poems like that are important, especially in establishing the context on which a reader ought to understand the cohesivity of a collection. What this collection struggled with, for me, was that these 'contextualising' poems were perpetual and unending throughout the piece in a way that appeared flippant-as though to bulk the collection up.
For me, a poem should speak to one idea holistically. There is, of course, room for thematic or idealistic intersection, but in this instance of crossover, the subsequent poem should add to a conversation/idea/theme in order to develop the reader's understanding of the speaker. How many poems about horses, storms, self harms or bones are
Ghost Poetry sought, more than to build a large discussion of pastoral suppression and oppression, to repeat it's established motifs rather than develop them. This stunted its potential capacity to intersect personal emotions with larger-scale a condemnation (or reflection? I could never truly tell the emotion of the speaker about this sphere of society because it was both portrayed beautifully but concurrently portrayed dangerously, a didacticism I was very excited to investigate and was left wanting more from) of the context in which such personal grievances are nurtured.
The standout poem for me was the collection was Wreck, a poem that aptly, swiftly and articulately distorts the motif of the horse to discuss the personal. It intersects the context the collection had built with the personal discussion of the speaker's trauma.
I will be the first to admit that many of these poems indicated a strong control over language, a capacity to understand poetic form, and a dedication to crafting a poem that felt 'complete'.
However, the main gripe I had with this collection was that it felt like a chapbook extended into an entire collection. Most of these poems had no place being here.
For instance, I have no issue with poems speaking to an environment, a society, a place, a location. I think poems like that are important, especially in establishing the context on which a reader ought to understand the cohesivity of a collection. What this collection struggled with, for me, was that these 'contextualising' poems were perpetual and unending throughout the piece in a way that appeared flippant-as though to bulk the collection up.
For me, a poem should speak to one idea holistically. There is, of course, room for thematic or idealistic intersection, but in this instance of crossover, the subsequent poem should add to a conversation/idea/theme in order to develop the reader's understanding of the speaker. How many poems about horses, storms, self harms or bones are
Ghost Poetry sought, more than to build a large discussion of pastoral suppression and oppression, to repeat it's established motifs rather than develop them. This stunted its potential capacity to intersect personal emotions with larger-scale a condemnation (or reflection? I could never truly tell the emotion of the speaker about this sphere of society because it was both portrayed beautifully but concurrently portrayed dangerously, a didacticism I was very excited to investigate and was left wanting more from) of the context in which such personal grievances are nurtured.
The standout poem for me was the collection was Wreck, a poem that aptly, swiftly and articulately distorts the motif of the horse to discuss the personal. It intersects the context the collection had built with the personal discussion of the speaker's trauma.
January 22, 2025
Explores grief and depression, along with the means that people try to deal with these emotions - addiction, self-harm, isolation - in a blunt, brutal language where the body and self seem bisected; at war over what seems best. At times, I wondered about the identity of the speaker and their regret and sadness being the observations of a ghost peering back at a life. Features horses heavily as a kind of ironic symbol of freedom: free in their paddocks, but tamed therein. I guess it asks: are people truly capable of being free of their woe? Or are they just actors on a caged in stage, performing their progressively more and more tired attempts to escape over and again? There is a kind of off putting frankness to the language. But I wonder if this was also a point; that there is no talking around the pits of despair and what people do in there. It is ugly and sad and sharp and full of blood. Indeed, there can be no lyric poetry in this sense. Still, the teacher in me recoils at some of the self-harm in the book and worries about what it may or may not communicate to different readers
January 15, 2024
Robbie Coburn is an incredible Australian poet. A young talent to watch! Ghost Poetry will haunt you. His best work yet.
January 17, 2024
Sublime. An exquisite collection that should be savoured. Highly recommend.
May 25, 2025
Didn't engage with me.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews