Poetry. B N Oakman's deceptively conversational tone and wry humor complement writing that is elegant, sometimes confronting, and which shuns obscurity in favor of clarity. He elicits feeling through style, phrasing and understatement rather than by imposing emotion. You'll be drawn into topics ranging from the socio-economic to the personal--the ekphrastic to football--the political to the historical.
One man's definition of his gender manifests itself against a backdrop of relationships, family, and society. Satirically challenges the illusions and fantasies of contemporary culture with smart, playful, and surprisingly intimate verse. A blunt and honest account about all the things men never discuss, including taboo subjects.
Like water spilling over stones, these poems seem to bubble up from the depths. These are luminous reflections on the complex and sometimes fraught relationships between society and the natural world.
B N Oakman finds poetry in the ordinary, the exotic, the political and the aesthetic. No head of State or classical film is safe from his exacting eye, which yields refreshing insights about subjects we thought we already understood. Oakman writes poems for those annoyed by poets. Resisting the florid and the abstract, Oakman drives directly at the point, with here and there a verse like Incan stonework, so carefully composed you barely see the joins. - Geoff Lemon, Editor, Going Down Swinging His poems are filled with surprises, sometimes making us smile, but the unexpected distilled truths he uncovers about ourselves and the world in which we live, can leave us weak and trembling, but always wanting more. - Peter Cundall, Peter Cundall Reads War Poetry He goes to the centre of things, drawing on both past and present as he creates landscapes of feeling in poems in which history, politics, people and places are refracted through a deeply felt understanding of the human condition. - Valerie Krips, Editor, Arena Magazine A collection of not just second but infinitely reconsidered thoughts on all the major themes of life and literature; a succession of brief encounters with a rich, and enriching, array of people, places, passions. - Ian Britain, former editor Meanjin Moments of frolic are shot through with wisdom, as elsewhere a purposeful ruggedness leads on to refinement. So many poems are distinguished by their final line: demonstrations of organic closure - conceptually retroactive, forceful yet elegant. - John Flaus, actor and critic
In her latest volume, Jane Williams, winner of the Anne Elder Award and the D.J O'Hearn Memorial Fellowship, continues to test the boundaries of what poetry can be rather than what many people assume it is. This is a collection with urban grit. It will speak to you in themes as intimate as next door, or as abstract as the next galaxy. You won't be able to put it down.
Tincture Journal is a quarterly literary journal based in Brisbane, Australia and collecting interesting new works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Australia and the world.
From the ashes of the Penguin Australia Poetry Series, a new publishing house took wing. New and emerging creators, as well as established voices sought an independent publishing house with a global vision and an innovative approach. They found IP. Now, 20 years on, more than forty creators return to celebrate the survival of this maverick venture with the very best of work past, current and future. Their message to you is that independent publishing houses like IP are, and always will be, an essential part of the cultural landscape even in the face of globalisation and aspiring robots. Who are these daring writers whose work is Just off Message? You know how to find them.
Poetry. RUIN is one of the first poetry collections in the world to explore the epic tragedy of the Iraq War (2003--20 ). Using four distinctive voices, and constructed almost as a thriller, Roberta Lowing's 55 poems re-create the devastating invasion and years of betrayal and heartbreak--and moments of hope and illumination--endured by Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. RUIN pays tribute to the Twentieth Century's greatest humanist poets and resonates with the influences of Neruda, Levertov, Celan and more. This work is of our time for our time, a collection which expresses the anxieties and aspirations of all those who resist the dark forces shaking our world.
