Ken Bolton

A selection drawn from their various intoxicating books (Airborne Dogs, Nutters Without Fetters, Poems of Relative Unlikelihood, The Wallah Group, The Gutman Variations (their study of Jacques Lacan), the verse novel The Ferrara Poems—later filmed—and Lucky For Some). Warning: will produce exhilaration, euphoria, general systemic excitation, scorn, weeping, laughter. Parodic, yet intense—poems terse, thoughtful, complex or pellucid, philosophical, and not...

Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping through the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem's jib, there the poise & rancour of another. For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some moment of last judgement & wave at the gate keeper, a tall and bearded...

In Sly Mongoose the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an 'ordinary punter', a beaver, a worried mother and a cyclist. There is a sequence drawn from a...

The author's playfulness is to the fore in this strange, charming book. It is a game which invites the reader to roll the dice, take a card from the deck, gain points, lose a turn, and, one way or another, advance around a notional game board: a pirate's world of exotic ports, risky encounters, escapades, wonders and the routine of...