Alan Wearne

Alan Wearne is this country's most public poet, a master of the Australian idiom, the recorder of its fashions, and the scourge of its big-noters, pretenders, and crooks. They are the targets of the central poem in this collection, The Vanity of Australian Wishes, which draws on Samuel Johnson and Juvenal, 'who must have known that combination of bemusement, annoyance,...

"Wearne's epics and fragments are like the traces of a ruined culture, in which everybody got to star in their own domestic drama or screwball romance. Until you realise that it's happening, here and now: you are being waltzed around the living room of middle-class folklore." - Bonny Cassidy "Australia's finest verse satirist" - Peter Pierce Alan Wearne specialises in...

A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre-World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne's latest contribution to the verse novel genre. Propelled at times (though never exclusively) by politics, there is, of course, plenty of room for satire. The scope of the tales ranges from tragedy to tragicomedy to comedy to farce, with all the muses contributing....

This is a selection from a poet who believes that Australia still has countless stories to tell, re-tell and imagine. These are works by someone intrigued by the varieties of poetic forms, who is a lover of verse satire and a believer in the contemporary power of dramatic monologues. Tradition is, for Alan Wearne, of continuing relevance since as he...