AustLit

'A separated man finds a book of poems written by an old flame that tempts him back to a love that seemed too good to be true at the time...

'An opera singer returns from Europe to find his music teacher’s wife who taught him the meaning of true passion...

'A teenage girl competing in an Eisteddfod at Port Arthur finds that the brutal historic site and her hostess have more than a few secrets — and ghosts — in common...

'Migrating north to Queensland, a man finds his lover immersed in more than a change of scene...

'All hell breaks loose on a cul-de-sac when two otherwise married people admit to having it off — right under the nose of Neighbourhood Watch...' (Publication summary)

'In this collection, Reiter extends his experiments with "fusion poetry" to focus on Paul Gauguin, who spent years in Tahiti musing on the fate of artists, especially Vincent Van Gogh, with whom he'd had a stormy relationship at Arles, France.'

'Poetry. Back in 1994, when David Rowbotham released his New and Selected Poems, 1945-1993, a flurry of reviews appeared in the major newspapers and magazines remarking on how richly Rowbotham deserved more recognition as one of Australia's major poets of the past century. But if he is the most major of Australia's neglected poets, what is remarkable is that Rowbotham has continued to write sixty years on, in a confident and lucid voice that transcends single continents and cultures. POEMS FOR AMERICA is certain to earn Rowbotham that elusive literary Oscar.' (Publication summary)

'Commended, Best Poetry, IP Picks 2006. Dark Husk of Beauty explores the duality of beauty and ugliness, of creation and destruction. The title section addresses the disintegrative beauty of the body subject to the ravages of passion, disease and death. The second section takes up the metaphor of 'Prophecy' Ezekiel s prophecy over the plain of dry bones that, gathered together, grow flesh and are restored to life. In the third section, 'Wings of Desire', the poems defy aesthetic dualism, undeterred by the punishments inflicted for the artists heresy. The final poem, a sequence of versions of lesser-known works of Rilke, attempts to negotiate the portal separating such extremes through grace. This collection appeals to readers across generations, from older adolescents to adults. The material traverses through pop references, film, mythology and psychoanalytic archetypes. Essential for schools and libraries to place in their poetry sections.' (Publication summary)

'Stephen Oliver's new book, Harmonic, is a tour de force, and I doubt that Australasian letters will see a more important volume of poems in this decade. If his gift in the past has been for the beautifully crafted lyric and the brilliant image, here we have the series of major poems that should cement his reputation, once and for all. It is a volume that takes on, centrally, the modernist inheritance and the difficult question of nature; and if its primary point of departure is Wallace Stevens (a claim which needs some qualification), the result is a Stevens updated by seventy years, a driven examination of the role of the poet and of the imagination in the twilight in which modernism disappears. And the volume as a whole has an architectonic, a movement from an early crisis of metaphysics to a final home-coming, in a brilliant series of poems that celebrate the real. - Nicholas Reid, Antipodes'