AustLit

'An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking. West’s intensely regional focus stands in dialogue with Europe and antiquity. Landscapes reveal the tangle of their historical dimensions, as the rivers of both the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia and the Po Valley in northern Italy merge and flow into the wider currents of the Southern Ocean. Again and again, language and the senses throw themselves into the nameless riot of the world, from eucalypts and clouds to a medieval bell tower and the sounds a pencil makes as it crosses a page.' (Publication summary)

'Does it make sense to invoke the Muses today? Few of us believe our poems will be better for praying to stola-clad women sitting on a mountain in Greece. This book asks the reader to consider the Muse as something more – a vehicle for acknowledging cultural legacies that radiate out from the past and into contemporary Australia. In addressing the Muses we talk to that inheritance. In these essays Simon West examines our metaphors for reaching back after inspiration. Rather than cultural rubble ripe for plunder, he celebrates our waterways in imagining that heritage, rivers that nourish the red gums across floodplains. In doing so he ranges widely, bridging Classical and European interests with a celebration of Australian poets, while asking, always, where is Parnassus now?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The backdrop of Carol and Ahoy is the Goulburn River and its floodplains around Shepparton. Ancestry and watchful reflection combine seamlessly in these poems, which are always in search of "what is tactile and particular", be it a gum tree, an agave or the past. Simon West's fluid, ever-shifting gaze will be familiar to readers of his previous volumes.' (Publication summary)

'‘It was a pretty idle afternoon in Victoria Barracks’, McAuley would later say. ‘I suppose we must have started about lunchtime.’ What followed is well known. In October 1943 two young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the fictitious poet Ern Malley, whose slim manuscript of surreal poems, The Darkening Ecliptic, they sent to Max Harris and his magazine Angry Penguins. The idea was to ridicule this new movement of ‘garish images without coherent meaning and structure’. McAuley famously described how,'  (Introduction) 

'The Ladder is Simon West’s third collection of poetry, and his first in four years. Many earlier preoccupations return—the natural environment, Italian art, the dimensions of place. There is a new focus on worldly and artistic responsibility, and a fascination with the ‘certain poise’ of ‘being in between’. At the collection’s heart are the building blocks of language, along with the more literal ones of Rome, where some of these poems were written during a residency at the Whiting studio in 2012.' (Publication summary)

'In August 1961, the Melbourne newspaper Truth ran the headline GREAT POEM HOAX: HOUSEWIFE FOOLS THE EXPERTS WITH HER NAUGHTY SONNETS. The page three article began:

A Tasmanian poet-housewife has become the centre of a literary storm because of two sonnets she sent to a magazine as a hoax. The sonnets concealed a message – and a rude word – in words from the first letter of each line. The poet is Mrs Gwen Harwood, of Hobart, wife of a University Tasmania lecturer … The first sonnet said ‘So long, Bulletin’. The second gave an earthy and uncomplimentary opinion of all editors.'

  (Introduction)