Coral Carter is a poet
Her poetry is Australian in tone, encompassing rural, urban, suburban and desert. Coral writes with an unsentimental and muscular energy. She lives on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar in Perth, Boorloo, Western Australia.
Coral's latest book, Good Grief is available now. You can purchase right here on Coral's website. Just click the button below...
"Her voice drives the senses down corrugated lines of language."
Rose van Son
"Sharp, unsentimental, sometimes as harshly beautiful as the landscapes it inhabits."
Julie Watts
"Imaginative! Energetic! Coral Carter sometimes writes like a songbird, at other times like a nightclub bouncer."
Andrew Burke
"Coral Carter is all colours of the rainbow, and some more besides."
Jennifer Compton
Good Grief
by Coral Carter
"A book of presences brought into close focus by absences, missed chances, and the pathos of the unchangeable. Carter's deft use of image and formal structure brings the worlds of the departed into a kind of immediacy that rolls over a reader like a passing storm. This is a poetry of family and loss that is deeply human, and which will touch the most human of hearts" Alan Fyfe
"Coral Carter possesses a rare talent for writing about ordinary lives with extraordinary precision. Her images and language are unmistakeably Australian, evoked with the poet's signature style of humorous honesty. There is nothing of bush-ballad cliché here, yet people who never normally read poetry would recognise themselves in these pages. The poems are salt and vinegar: crisp, sharp, satisfying. There is nothing sentimental in their clear-eyed accounting, yet the work is shot through with surpassing tenderness. The collection is well named. The poems refract the paradox of grief in all its manifestations, including the ironic Aussie saying "good grief". It takes time to discern what is good about grief, just as it takes time to tune in to the spare beauty of desert country. Immerse yourself in these poems and you will learn to do both." Liana Joy Christensen
Rochford Street Review
Good Grief launched by Liana Joy Christensen, July 2026
"The exquisite, spare simplicity of this poem delights me, as does the whole collection. Carter’s work is never sentimental, and the precision of her pen inks an accurate cartography of the heart. In the skillful hands of this poet, grief is indeed good."
About Coral
Coral Carter was born in Kalgoorlie but now lives in Bayswater, Western Australia.
She reads often at Perth Poetry Club and has published two collections: Descended from Thieves (Mulla Mulla Press, 2012) and Backyard Listening (Mulla Mulla Press, 2019).
Coral has been published in various literary journals including Westerly and Cordite.
Coral was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2022 and won the Looking Forward/Looking Back Poetry Prize 2023.
She was longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize in 2024 and won the Grieve 2025 Robert Millar Memorial Award.
Coral's books are available here.
Poetry by Coral Carter
Click the book covers or Buy Now buttons below to purchase Coral Carter's books
"Coral Carter is all colours of the rainbow, and some more besides... funny – and sad, wretched – and exultant, sober – and passionate... sly, serene, insouciant, earthy and perspicacious... These are songs of a life lived... It's a compelling read." - Jennifer Compton
"Imaginative! Energetic! Coral Carter sometimes writes like a songbird, at other times like a nightclub bouncer. Take it on the chin, baby!" - Andrew Burke
"To read Carter’s poems is to encounter the multiple passions of the poet: meteorology, geology, landscape, people, birds, clouds. She documents the discarded, revels in selecting the minutiae that best reveal something true of people or place. She has a particular talent for the overheard conversational phrase, layering them into rich, allusory poems that hint at multiple layers of meaning beyond the face value of the words. To read them is to eavesdrop on the slipstream of culture." - Liana Joy Christensen, Rochford Street Review
