Mark Mahemoff
Mark Mahemoff is an Australian poet, critic and psychotherapist. His work is represented internationally in journals and anthologies. His latest book is Beautiful Flames (Flying Islands, 2023).
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Completing a Bachelor of Arts at what is now Western Sydney University, Mark began his working life in the area of employment rights for people with a disability. He also qualified in rehabilitation counselling and couple and family counselling. He has been writing poetry since his university days and has published in journals and anthologies and completed a master’s in writing at The University of Technology in the early 2000s. He has also published seven collections of his poetry and one CD selection of his work. He also publishes reviews of poetry and psychotherapy books. He works as a Couple and Family Therapist and lives in Sydney’s inner west with his partner and two children.
Mark realises that his writing primarily involves memorializing and eulogizing the overlooked and forgotten. Not only people but places and objects. He is driven by the weight of his forebears’ historical loss. Loss of family, of identity, of homeland. But secreted amongst the loss is humour. He sees his task as shaping all these elements, to the best of his ability, into poetry.
His latest book Beautiful Flames continues to explore these preoccupations but also newer ones such as travel and numerous poetic influences. His book ends with a long homage to John Ashbery, a poet he a has returned to again and again with frustration but also for inspiration. This frustration reflects his own struggle to write in a way which balances clean, minimalist clarity with ambiguity and hidden depth. The struggle continues.