Giramondo is celebrating the release of three fine new collections of poetry by John Mateer, Joanne Burns and Fiona Wright with a special book deal. Order all three books for $50 - at a saving of 30%. Postage is included free.
Fiona Wright - Knuckled
The poems in Knuckled are themselves bony and assertive, stripped down to the detail, which appeals in its physical quality and the manner in which it is offered, as much as in its compression of feeling. There is a strong sense of the social: Wright’s details embody attitudes, prejudices, anxieties, identifications; and they carry an awareness of belonging in place, from the flooded towns of the Snowy Mountains to the burnt-out landscape of Victoria, to Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia, and the suburbs of Western Sydney.
John Mateer - Southern Barbarians
John Mateer is an important Australian poet: he is also one of the most cosmopolitan. In Southern Barbarians he follows the traces of the Portuguese empire in Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Japan and China. This empire is a fugitive one, notable for its saudade, its awareness of loss, its yearning for a world that appears only intermittently in this one, with the poet inhabiting this diasporic world as migrant, tourist, desterrado, haunted by doubles and reflections, each place reminding him of other places.
Joanne Burns - Amphora
The poems in amphora seize on the miraculous moments contained in life and language, interrogating them with scepticism, celebrating them with a comic sense of wonder. Their focus ranges from the magical exploits of saints recalled from the poet’s Catholic childhood, to her variations on the Zen koan, customised as koannes, to the accidental ‘out of the blue’ poems in the final sequence. From common things, from familiar words and phrases, and from the unfamiliar too, Burns draws attitudes which define a way of living – gladness, curiosity, and above all sensual delight in the abundance of the world’s offerings and the possibilities of language: ‘may the polysemic flower bloom’.
