Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New & Selected - Softcover

Tranter, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0702235571 ISBN 13: 9780702235573

Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

John Tranter is a leading contemporary English-language poet. He has published over twenty collections of verse and several anthologies and has given more than one hundred readings and talks around the world. He has visited New York City over twenty times, and has lived in London, Melbourne, Singapore, and elsewhere, and is now based in Sydney. He is the founding editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket (now Jacket2 at UPenn), and the founder of the Australian Poetry Library project, which publishes over 40,000 poems on the Internet, as well as the Journal of Poetics Research.

From 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. (Feb.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0702235571
• ISBN 13: 9780702235573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 321