AustLit

'David Bunn's second book of poems spans a decade of published and unpublished writing. The poems include speech about politics, society and settler colonialism but also consider painting, the uses of travel, gravity waves, earthquakes, love, landscape, sculling, age, wine, war, geology, translation, vision, the Big Bang, the succession of the generations, death and the squaring of things with your father. They do this in forms which respond to writers such as Dante and Auden, and to musicians like Keith Jarrett and Vivaldi. They include a set of verse letters written during the early pandemic on writing, art and plague. The drive is to find what lies behind first appearances, myth, commonplace, deceptive and insulating formulae, and stunted rhetoric. They aspire to be as healthful as Wordsworth or as radically beautiful as Camille Pissarro, but as Dr Johnson said, explaining why he was a failed philosopher, cheerfulness always keeps on breaking in.' (Publication summary) 

'A trade unionist conceives a grand poem which will encompass his whole life since World War II. Soon he finds he must include his grandfather in 1915, his mother in Hobart in 1935, his father in Egypt with the air force, George Orwell in Spain, a German pilgrim, some French resisters shot in 1944, Soviet sailors drowned in a sub, Cole Porter, Venice, Bob Dylan, Hans Holbein, Anne of Cleves, Trotsky and Tsar Nicholas II. His daughters will be in there, and his wives, and his work. There will be politics, dreams, elections, paintings, mountains, funerals, vineyards, folk music. He cannot evade his implication in dispossession and oppression. These poems try to make some sense of our disquieting times - without certainty, without buttressing from religion or ideology. There's nothing else like this.' (Publication summary)