AustLit

'Luminous and profound, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is the eleventh collection of poetry from one of Australia’s most respected and celebrated contemporary poets and translators. Over five sections, Boyle offers a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to be human, moving from the personal to the social and political, from the immediacy of the writer’s home to a traveller on a train to Shanghai or a French pianist performing Ravel, as seen on YouTube. This mingling of inner and outer realms continues in dream narratives that sit alongside political poems, such as ‘Our World’, and final haiku-like poems that return us to the vision of our small place in a world filled with other-than-human presences. This is a work of deep imagination and subtle humour, a generous sharing in the sometimes magical, sometimes uncertain and unsettling experience of being human.'(Publication summary)

 (Publication summary)

'A path headed off underneath a row of low-lying bushes, below the tangle of old trees, small splashes of yellow paint indicating a direction of sorts, and silvery rays of light revealed a creek moving under the branches. And, for you, behind it all there was this conviction that something would always lead somewhere – as if feeling the sun for one moment on your body wasn’t enough ...

'Ideas of Travel builds in significant ways on Peter Boyle's previous two books, his award-winning Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings. This collection again taps into a deep dreamlike symbolism and directs this to great existential effect. Even staying still we are travelling—across the seasons, across the day, across a life. Written over fourteen months of the pandemic, Ideas of Travel subverts the boundaries between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, ourselves and others. In this sequence of 140 new poems acclaimed poet Peter Boyle examines our sense of what it is to be alive.' (Publication summary)