{"title":"John Mateer","description":"\u003cp\u003eJohn Mateer's work offers a rich exploration of identity, place, and history, often weaving personal narrative with broader cultural reflections. Through evocative poetry and prose, readers are invited into landscapes both familiar and foreign, capturing the nuances of migration, memory, and belonging.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHis books, such as \u003cem\u003eJoao\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eSouthern Barbarians\u003c\/em\u003e, blend lyrical language with keen insights into the intersections of arts and culture, making his writing a compelling journey through diverse human experiences.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"joao-by-john-mateer-9781925336627","title":"Joao","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNew collection from award-winning poet John Mateer\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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 illumination and joy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMateer is both ironic and affectionate in his treatment of this picaresque figure, creating through his sonnet sequence a narrative which is new in Australian writing, the worldwide adventures of the poet as anti-hero, one who, despite his disappointments, still believes in the power of literature to create a sense of belonging, and to invoke 'the deep mandala of meeting and friendship'.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'John Mateer is a poet with a peripatetic sense of self who is fascinated by cross-cultural historical currents and transformations... his poems frequently register how history and its associated human ambitions and cruelties taint or inflect much that we know.' - \u003ci\u003eSydney Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47362743501036,"sku":"9781925336627","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/13691603482873.jpg?v=1772899542"},{"product_id":"unbelievers-or-the-moor-by-john-mateer-9781922146502","title":"Unbelievers, or The Moor","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJohn Mateer's previous poetry book, \u003cem\u003eSouthern Barbarians\u003c\/em\u003e, 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. \u003cem\u003eUnbelievers, or The Moor\u003c\/em\u003e takes this exploration one step further, to recover its Arabic and Islamic origins in Al-Andalus, the Moorish state which occupied much of present-day Spain and Portugal from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA seat of learning and culture, which combined Muslim, Christian, and Jewish influences, it provides a model for Mateer's own mixed background as a South African Australian, and for his nomadic identity as a poet. The collection is much concerned with influential but invisible histories; with the poem as a moment of connection between languages and cultures, so that it seems already to exist in translation; with doubles and hauntings, friends in far places, and above all, what Mateer calls 'the irony of Elsewhere'.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47384194941164,"sku":"9781922146502","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9876143482872.jpg?v=1773401911"},{"product_id":"southern-barbarians-by-john-mateer-9781920882587","title":"Southern Barbarians","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Portuguese traders who brought Europe to Japan in the sixteenth century were known as 'southern barbarians'. In his new collection \u003ci\u003eSouthern Barbarians\u003c\/i\u003e, John Mateer offers a contemporary re-charting of the Portuguese Empire.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis empire is a fugitive one, notable for its \u003cem\u003esaudade\u003c\/em\u003e, its awareness of loss, its yearning for a world that appears only intermittently in this one, as an echo, a trace, a memory. At its heart is the figure of the poet, as migrant, tourist, \u003cem\u003edesterrado\u003c\/em\u003e. His identity is inhabited by other identities, just as the place he is in reminds him of other places.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHaunted by doubles and reflections, accompanied by 'spirit guides' who pass between this world and the other, he is both ghostly and connected wherever he goes, and connected precisely because of his ghostliness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47461425610988,"sku":"9781920882587","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781920882587-southern-barbarians.jpg?v=1774967618"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/collections\/john-mateer.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}