Urban Myths - 210 Poems
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Winner 2006 CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry (Victorian Premier's Literary Awards)
Urban Myths: 210 Poems brings the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia, together with a generous selection of new work. Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranter’s poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.
JUDGES REPORT - Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
The new and uncollected poems in John Tranter’s Urban Myths make a significant addition to his oeuvre. Control and ease are evident in the writing, which displays personages, occasions and moods of the metropolitan modern world. Tranter’s latest poems refresh through the exercise of urbane skills: this is a poet suave and playful, but never aloof; linguistically various, assured in style, and never less than fully attentive."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Known internationally as the founder and editor of Jacket, the first (and best) large-scale Internet poetry journal, Tranter, since the 1970s, has enjoyed another, broader reputation in his native Australia: readers there see him as a leading figure in Australia's slippery, intellectual, urbane, post-'60s, postmodern poetry scene. This (rightly) big third selected is the first to sample his whole career. Here are the racy early-1970s poems whose sharp fragments protest middle-class complacency, Australian traditions and the Vietnam War, "when the new alphabet soup of the earth/ is raised into a flag." Here are Tranter's declarations of literary rebellion, showing "a gift to stir up fevered passions/ in a fit to envision a disastrous future." Here are his hymns to Sydney, regrets about his rural youth, and later reconciliations with bourgeois householdry and fatherhood: "would we be satisfied/ with our childhood," he asks, "if it happened again?" Here, too, are Tranter's many, repeated, successful experiments with traditional forms: sonnets rhymed and unrhymed, sestinas, Sapphics, pantoums and haiku, among others, including some of Tranter's own inventions. Tranter's cool, cosmopolitan versatility, with its eye on an ambivalent future, has yet to attain the international reputation of his bitter, backward-looking Australian rival, Les Murray; with this big collection, that may change.