BOOKS

Please Note: The Puncher & Wattmann website is now live and my recent books can be purchased through its online set-up.

 

When I say 'current' I have to acknowledge how variable this term is, especially as poetry books are known for slow sales - but can have long lives. So, I include here books that are recent and books less recent but still in print. They are: (my trilogy) Keeping Carter, The Keeper of Fish, Keepers, and The Well Mouth, A Cretive Life and Sky Poems.

The Keeper of Fish         Keeping Carter

The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter are books attributed to the eccentric loner poets Alan Fish and MA Carter, respectively, but through the unexpected medium of Philip Salom. These two poets are my heteronyms. Their books are rich with the poetry of character and individual style.

Alternatively, you could read both books as first-person verse-novels where nothing happens... 

I will also be adding an article on the attractions and experiences of writing while channeling a different persona, which is a choice few poets make (Fernando Pessoa is the famous example) but do so with inventive fascination. Perhaps compulsion.

Alan Fish is a lyric poet, sombre, linguistically detailed; he is a poet whose poems identify closely with his emotions. Fish came to life in the basement of Keepers, my previous collection and a near but not quite verse novel ... or some such thing. In Keepers Alan Fish spoke and moved as the sardonic commentator and narrative stirrer under every page of the poems in the Art School but in The Keeper of Fish he swims free into his own voice and poetry.

Carter is also quite lyrical, especially in a musical, whimsical and eccentric way, but he is especially sardonic and wayward. There are many things out there in the world that Carter does not like and he says so. He has a sense of humour but he is a bad lad. Therefore he goes for brilliance and badness as a poetic sport. He is an original. There is no poet in Australia like Carter.

 

Sales: These books are for sale! For older books mentioned (The Well Mouth, A Cretive Life, Sky Poems) please use the Contact link at the bottom of the page to make a request (I have all copies of these titles). For my novels, Playback and Toccata and Rain, please contact Fremantle Press.

Keepers

Creativity intrigues us. There can be no clear understanding of what it is and isn't and yet it's something we are deeply endowed with, sometimes in bursts, sometimes for sustained periods of time. What happens when we 'teach' it? I was there - as a student and then, from 1983 to 2008, lecturing in Creative Writing in university creative arts programs. I just had to write a book about it, eventually, the accomplishments, the huge gulfs and uncertainties, of this state we call creativity and of the humans who meet and interact there.

Keepers is full of poems about people and artistry, and work, and is therefore a novelistic book. It features named characters, a single narrator of sorts (who occupies six lines of prose at the bottom of each page of poems) and a very loose plot - or what I call a narrative of associations. Included among these figures are portrayals of historic painters, writers and musicians who have fascinated me by their lives and the strongly individual nature of their creations. 

I am told it is my funniest book, which relaxes me somewhat; I hoped it was - there is much that is funny in these places. The main character, called Fish, is empathetic but is not one to suffer fools, and he can be sardonic. Still, he is a lonely man, and as he observes the goings-on from his lowly position as a print room assistant cum cleaner, he sees that creative art too can be thankless, and lonely - one of art's greatest paradoxes. Fish is sometimes a flaneur, wandering through the city; or he is sitting in his workplace basement playing the quietly secretive Go, the Japanese board game, with whoever stops by. At times he behaves as if he couldn't care less, but he does. He gets involved. The staff and the students and the artists are the real heroes, but he is the deep thread of presence in the book. 

The Well Mouth

In 2002 and for the next year or so I kept returning to an idea I'd had years earlier - of writing about wells. Specifically the sense of being down there, fallen, inside a well. Neither dead nor alive, being in an imagined state of un-given consciousness, with thoughts, memories, feelings, in a language of permeability across these conditions. When I was a child there was a boarded-over well I was never to go near - and therefore it became a kind of sacred site - a place not to be. It might collapse, like the sand-cubbies kids had died in, or the burrows in sand hills that collapsed, or the caves and the mines deep underground.

Merged with this - the dreaming of this well theme and the voices were both about mergings - was the motif of entrapment and murder, specifically the recurrent stories of women (usually) who had gone missing, presumed murdered, and were dropped down wells or shafts. The more I thought about this the more certain I became of a structure. The woman in the well exists at the bottom of the page, under the poems, and it is she who hears the suspended voices of the poems - which are the last thoughts and imaginings of the recently dead. And they are very talkative (or thinkative). She is their medium, their cypher and their sometimes commentator. Merged with their voices are the accounts of her own murder and those responsible for it. This aspect of the book is about criminals and corrupt police and the populist commercial ways media represent them. 

It is a Dante-esque world, one of strangely poised levels of consciousness. It is lyrical yet dark, and grim but also oddly funny. It is also a world of mythical shifts through the shadows of Tiresias and Odysseus, parables of folly, narratives of want and fragments of phrasing, speaking, remembering.  

A Cretive Life

Some books work as miscellanies and their strength is in variety and the unexpectedness of the different poems. Whereas the above two books are thematic and create an overall whole, A Cretive Life is made up of a broader mix of subjects and styles, with only one discontinuous group of poems holding to a theme. These poems memorialise my father, who died in the late 90s, and feature him within the context of family and the farm and his dying. The writing is therefore more personal. Different, especially, to the less immediately personal poems of the other books.

Again, though quite unlike the voices of The Well Mouth, there is voiced within this book a precariousness of perception and an awareness of that mindfulness which has no speech, or no public speech. Then there are poems which utilise the I Ching and digress into realms of chance. Against all these are poems of art, construction and invention, palimpsests or imitations, and especially preservation - the attempts we make to hold fast to our behaviours, memories and objects of value. This preservation, or 'holding onto' within form or pattern, seems a likely follow-through from the poems about loss. And I have included several longer poems which are decidedly playful and ironic takes on poetry and film to balance the more seriously emotional poems. 

Sky Poems

During the mid 80s I was looking for a more expansive style and vision for a new book. Oskar Kokoshka was an artist I had just discovered - his brilliant painting 'Bride of the Wind', in particular, had a haunting affect. It occurred to me there could be an poetic representation of this, a world set in the sky, where imagined desires, urges, impulses, became instantly real without the intervention of chance or accident (which is our actual world) and in this world all aspirations from the Id to the highest sense of after-worldly yearning, were realised. I didn't know the term then - but a virtual world. 

Great idea, but how to write it? For more than a year I worried and daydreamed through the quandary of how to represent any persons's desires becoming real within a framework of others similarly creating their worlds. If I wrote the first poem, perhaps it would be the clue to the whole; if I could imagine the whole, it could be the clue to any individual poem. Catch 22 of a kind. Frustrated with this bind, I decided to be pragmatic and prompt my mind with a title: 'Instructions for Living in the Sky'. Write the bloody manual! And it worked. In one afternoon I wrote a long poem that outlined how the Sky world could be felt and thought. After a two week delay - with me thinking it was a year of cooking for one poem - it suddenly burst and the poems kept coming for months. 

The collection is a virtual world where visions of Paradise or Hell and the imageries of history and memory all play back through the medium of the poems. It is a hugely inclusive book, therefore, reaching way beyond the exclusive, verse novel sequence of The Projectionist, the book that preceded it. It is lyrical and extraordinarily expansive and compassionate, but is often ironic, satiric, and it includes from this known and darker world of ours, the brutality of desire that history has shown us all too capable of.

Poetry does not sell in big numbers. Most book titles sell rapidly at first, then slowly for years, then go out of print. Earlier poetry usually stays out of print unless/until chosen for the poet's Selected Poems. Unlike some more commercial publications of this kind, a Selected should be the equivalent of an artist's retrospective and gather together in one book a sampling of the best and most representative poetry from 20 years or so of sustained writing and publication. Over time a poet may publish a second, even a third, Selected Poems.

New and Selected Poems

My Selected was published in 1998, and sold out quite quickly, which was gratifying (a Selected, full of re-prints, is a bargain but can sell slowly if readers have enough of the earlier work). It includes a sizeable collection of new and previously unpublished poems about animals, odd characters, acupuncturists, follies and visitants. The publisher recently found one more box of them hidden away in the warehouse, so I have an unexpected couple of dozen left (should you want one).

Here, in reverse order of publication, are the earlier books of mine included in it:

The Rome Air Naked - a collection of poems based on my six-month Australia Council residency in Rome. It includes the largest group of love poems I have published (!) and many (of what I have named) concurrent poems - fragments and samples and short poems mixed together on the page with letters, histories, etc. Also a selection of cut-up poems based on my prose accounts of Rome.

Feeding the Ghost - poems from many sources, something of a miscellany, with political and satirical poems from Australia, poems about art and poetry - what I call 'feeding the ghost' - but with the bulk of poems set throughout my travels in Europe and ending in a long sonnet sequence of my Residency at the National University of Singapore.

Barbecue of the Primitives - a true miscellany, poems based on city, family and country, with special emphasis on the experiences and vulnerabilities of lovers, parents, mothers. Again, a contrast between the local and the international, with some expansive poems on wheatbelt life and land, and poems of singers, composers, etc.

Sky Poems - as seen in the Current Poems

The Projectionist - a verse novel before I thought to use that term. This book uses an un-named lyric narrator who describes life in and around a strange family by the name of Benchley. It is a tautly constructed series of portraits and narratives and lyric poems of searching, suffering and psychological metaphysics. I experimented a lot with syntax and imagery in this collection and it is tensile and alternating - between raw-to-grim and rather ecstatic. There is a religious awareness running through it, made ironic by the somewhat grotesque family presence.

The Silent Piano - my first collection, in two main categories: poems of family and rural life (my own) in the South West of Western Australia, and poems based on historical figures from Europe. The rural poems are frequently stark and include fairly violent representations of nature and farming life, in contrast therefore, to more idyllic pastorals. 

 

Toccata and Rain

My second novel. It was my experiment in fusion or hybrid structure, what I call a toccata and fugue, as against inventions of linguistics or syntax. It combines prose in brief chapters, narrated in third-person, with sonnets and ghazal-like poems in first-person, which stand in for / as the utterances and perceptions of the main character. The novel is the confused last few years of a man who has suffered a dissociative disorder - once called a fugue state amnesia... a man who has flown from one life into an assumed 'other', then fallen, as it were, back into his original self. The novel traces his attempts to make sense of who he is and what he has lived while in the fugue self, a self largely hidden from conscious awareness but (possibly) recoverable through hypnosis. A curious, poetic novel.

Playback

The main character is a folklorist who has set up residence on a cattle research station while visiting the nearby country town, and the farms, to record verbatim accounts of local history from the populace. The novel is vividly realistic but blended with a farcical vision of oddness and surreal eccentricity. There has a been a local tragedy that Jack Biner learns much of and which he feels increasingly unable to ignore, bringing his professional ethics into direct question. This book is an amusing but also intense vision of country town life and the uncertain varieties of 'truth'.

 

In 2007 Picaro Press from NSW published a chapbook of mine in their long-wagging Wagtail series. These books are of various composition but many are, like my own, a kind of mini-Selected Poems. They provide a brief sampling from earlier books, limited to something like 20 pages all up. They are cheap and great value and make good study material in schools as well as leading readers back to the original poetry in full book form. Mine is called:

The Family Fig Trees

It contains a natty selection, made by the editors and myself, with the poem of the title as a central work, a poem that has been anthologised several times and which stands as one of my best single poems. It looks into my family background, a lyric poem in the true sense, with me as son, child and adult, discovering the obvious and less obvious origins of family. This chapbook is still available from Picaro Press. 

Tremors  

This was published in the National Library of Australia Pamphlet Poets Series in 1992. They were neatly produced folding pamphlets of about 18 pages. Mine, again, sampled a few older books for poems to sit alongside new poems.