Vessels of Love is an annual poetry program presented by Poetry Sydney that seeks to explore ideas and forms of love over the week of Valentine’s Day, 8-14 February.
This year’s program focuses thematically on love’s forces of abundance and decay through the poetic works of seven artists: Faye Couros, Willo Drummond, Martin Edmond, Ethan Price, Pooja Mittal Biswas, Michele Seminara, and through the guardianship of Lenore Bassan, Minnie Agnes Filson (1898-1971).
Moving through gothic folktale, autobiography, eco-poetics, found poetry, magical realism, body horror and absurdism, Vessels of Love 2026 channels worlds where love sustains and destroys, feeds on itself, and creates its own environment. Harnessing poetry’s reach into film, sound and visual art, the collection captures love as a living, shifting force: love is perpetual motion, existing between the overwhelming richness of connection and the inevitable transformations of time.
Rather than resolving the tension between abundance and decay, these works inhabit it: the two are dance partners, each giving the other meaning, each making the other possible. Together, they occupy the space between what love is and what it does—between symbolism and lived experience, memory and fiction, the personal and the mythic.
Each of the films featured in the collection are a collaboration between this year’s feature artists and The Salons, with guest artists: printmaker Lenore Bassan (for Challenge), and collage artist Deby Cann (for æther).
The poetry films and spoken word recordings are now available to enjoy below. Selected works will appear in a range of spaces: visit Knox St Bar, Chippendale for Poetry Sydney’s Exhibition Program (featuring the Poem Phone and Poetry Gallery), Arts Friday on Eastside FM and Intelligent Animal’s DIP window gallery in Darlington.
Some of our poems include content that may prove distressing, more information is available
Willo Drummond
WATCH — THE COMMONS: AN ELEGY FOR MULTIPLE VOICES
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Willo Drummond is a Blue Mountains based poet and lecturer in creative writing. Her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, commended in the 2023 Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book and selected as one of six Australian poetry titles to feature in the 2024 Aesop Queer Library. Her work has been anthologised in Best of Australian Poems and elsewhere.
Ethan Price
WATCH — æther
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Ethan is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, poet, vocalist and composer living on Gadigal lands. He has studied and works in film and art video, within which this debut collaboration with Deby Cann and The Salons is a natural extension. Released in January 2026, his second album, Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, is named after the painting of the same name by Francois Lemoyne.
GUEST ARTIST—DEBY CANN
Deby uses vintage books, patterns, text and images to create inclusive, feminist collage artworks that challenge and reject the patriarchal narrative. Deconstructing stereotypes, gender assumptions, misogyny and patriarchal attitudes through reframing these destructive narratives.
Michele Seminara
WATCH — A TYPEWRITER GUILTY WITH LOVE
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Michele Seminara is a Sydney-based poet and editor whose work has featured in publications such as Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, and Australian Poetry Journal. She is the author of two poetry collections — Suburban Fantasy and Engraft — and two chapbooks, Scar to Scar (written with Robbie Coburn) and HUSH. Michele has performed her poetry and been a panellist and moderator at numerous literary events nationwide and serves as Co-Managing Editor of Verity La journal. She is currently working on her verse novella, Dis.
Martin Edmond
WATCH —A DAY ON HIVA OA
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Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune and grew up in small North Island towns. He has an MA from Victoria University of Wellington (1977) and a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney (2013). He travelled with avant-punk theatre Red Mole in the 1970s, worked as a screenwriter in the 1980s and has, since the 1990s, concentrated upon the writing of prose. In 2013 he received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in non-fiction. After forty years in Australia, in 2023 he moved to Japan, where he lives in Shinanomachi in the mountains of Honshu.
Faye Couros
WATCH — WHY BLACKBIRDS SING
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Faye is a Sydney based writer and poet influenced by classic literature and romanticism. She embraces free form and narrative structures, crafting worlds to curiously unpick the paradoxes of the human condition. Her work explores our contrasting capacity for both love and destruction in the stories of our lives.
Pooja Mittal Biswas
WATCH — MURDER / SUICIDE
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Pooja Mittal Biswas is an Indian-Australian based in Bidjigal Country. She has been widely published in literary journals like Meanjin and Overland. In 2024, she was shortlisted for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the South Australian Literary Awards. She has been awarded grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and Create NSW and has been interviewed or reviewed by The Age, The Australian and ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. She has been invited to numerous literary festivals. Currently, she teaches at the University of Sydney’s National Centre for Cultural Competence.
Minnie Agnes Filson
WATCH — CHALLENGE
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Minnie Agnes Filson (1898–1971) was born on 3 May 1898 at Wyalong, then a gold-mining settlement. She grew up in Newtown, Marrickville and Mosman and was educated there. She learned business studies and became manager of the Church Standard. On 6 December 1924, she married Arthur Johnston Filson. She developed rheumatoid arthritis during her early twenties which was exacerbated in 1926, six months after the birth of her son. Bed-bound, she adopted the pseudonym Rickety Kate. She was surrounded by many friends and family members who acted as scribes.
Filson contributed poems to various newspapers and magazines including The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1930s. She was a member of the Jindyworobak poetry movement: her 1944 book, Bralgah, was a Jindyworobak publication. Her poetry has been included in a number of anthologies including The Penguin Book of Australian Woman Poets, Sydney’s Poems: A Selection on the Occasion of the City’s One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary 1842–1992, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Australian Poetry Since 1788 and The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse.
Filson wrote Feet on the Ground in the 1940s, using the pseudonym Judith Grey. This autobiographical work was posthumously published in 2008 by her granddaughter, artist Lenore Bassan. Filson’s papers are held in the State Library of New South Wales.
GUEST ARTIST—LENORE BASSAN, GUARDIAN OF MINNIE AGNES FILSON’S ESTATE
Lenore is a printmaker/artist engaged with printmaking in some smaller or larger way since graduating from the Brisbane College of Art in 1975. ’I love to be absorbed by the endless ways of creating images and markmaking that printmaking offers. Making artist books is an extension of my printmaking practice. My ideas come from illustrating the poetry of my grandmother ‘Rickety Kate’ and honouring my ancestors from Romania and Australia in visual form.’