John Mateer

New collection from award-winning poet John Mateer In a sequence of 64 sonnets, John Mateer describes the encounters of an alter-ego, Joao, as he travels across the globe, attending festivals and readings, meeting with friends, lovers, and often-famous fellow authors. Questioning identity, melancholy in disposition, troubled by dreams and memories, Joao is also an innocent, and given to moments of...

John Mateer's previous poetry book, Southern Barbarians, traced the influence of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean. It was shortlisted for the PM's Award for Poetry and the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Literary Awards. Unbelievers, or The Moor takes this exploration one step further, to recover its Arabic and Islamic origins in Al-Andalus, the Moorish state which occupied much...

The Portuguese traders who brought Europe to Japan in the sixteenth century were known as 'southern barbarians'. In his new collection Southern Barbarians, John Mateer offers a contemporary re-charting of the Portuguese Empire. This empire is a fugitive one, notable for its saudade, its awareness of loss, its yearning for a world that appears only intermittently in this one, as...