Urban Myths: 210 Poems - Softcover

Tranter, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1458744272 ISBN 13: 9781458744272

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant, 2012

Synopsis

''Urban Myths:210 poems'' collects the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia. A generous selection of new work is also included. 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.

About this title

About the Author:

John Tranter is a leading Australian poet. He has been employed mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making reading tours to more than forty venues in the USA, England and Europe. He has lived in London and Singapore, and now lives in Sydney.

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: ReadHowYouWant
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1458744272
• ISBN 13: 9781458744272
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400