Starlight: 150 poems

With a celebrated fifty-year writing career behind him, John Tranter brings to Starlight the sophistication and ease of that experience, as well as enormous energy and exuberance. These new, vital poems continue to explore poetry's possibilities. Reading the collection is like entering a room abuzz with conversation.

Part of the book's project is to displace the authorial ego, and translation, mask and disguise are employed to this end, with Tranter reimagining work by T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire, and Ashbery in extraordinary and original ways. Tranter's skills as a ventriloquist and his ear for the quirks of expression create brilliantly realised voices of imagined speakers.

Tranter applies his lacerating wit to ideas of authorship, egotism, and poetry wars in this completely engaging book.