The Art Box Series

Quality reprint classics from Picaro Press

Good poetry just doesn't stay in print as long as it should.  Many of the most influential, interesting and relevant volumes from out best poets are no longer available.  Picaro Press is working to change that. 

Our Art Box Series aims to provide low-cost access to significant Australian poetry from the 1980s and earlier which, for whatever reason, is no longer generally available to the public. Each volume just costs $15, domestic postage included.  Or buy any three for just $40!  Titles in the series to date include:

Judith Beveridge, The Domesticity of Giraffes
David Campbell, The Man in the Honeysuckle
Gary Catalano, Fresh Linen
J. S. Harry, The Deer Under the Skin
Evan Jones, Understandings
Jean Kent, Verandahs
Andrew Lansdown, Waking and Always
Roger McDonald, Airship
Rhyll McMaster, Washing the Money
Jan Owen, Blackberry Season
Geoff Page, Smalltown Memorials
Roland Robinson, The Hooded Lamp
Judith Rodriguez, Mudcrab at Gambaro’s
Tom Shapcott, Shabbytown Calendar
R. A. Simpson, The Real Pompeii
Ken Taylor, At Valentine’s

More titles coming soon.  Order yours today!

little bit long time, ali cobby eckermann ($15.00)

In little bit long time we experience a true poet’s strong and singing voice...  She has a tradition of innovators behind her — poets from Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Lionel Fogarty — who also experimented with writing the spoken word and creating new forms.  When I first heard Ali read these poems I wanted copies immediately so I could spread the word.

                                               — Robert Adamson

Part of the Picaro Press Aegis Series: keeping the best poetry in print.

Mother Waits for Father Late

Andrew Burke ($15.00)

… a vividly realized world full of light and shade and precisely observed details.

                                                         — Thomas Shapcott

Burke explores the ambiguities of family both mercilessly and tenderly in a language always open to the possibilities of formal experiment and the expanding outreach of unexpected, often quirky, metaphor. The poetry has a natural ring that makes the force of imagination at work in it seem deceptively easy.  

                                                          — Andrew Taylor

… Andrew Burke sings many a satisfying song of love, nostalgia, sadness and joy. Lyrical, lucid and thoughtfully crafted, it is a fine achievement.

                                                          — Rod Moran, The West Australian

 Part of the Picaro Press Aegis Series: keeping the best poetry in print.

Lost in the Foreground, Stephen Edgar ($15.00)

Stephen Edgar is quietly building the Augustan garden of Australian poetry. Seldom have all the imaginable poetic qualities been combined into such a thoughtful poise, and with so easy-seeming a lyrical impulse. His poems not only demand to be read: they insist on being memorised, point for point. In Edgar’s spare but steadily accumulating body of work, aesthetic appreciation and scientific rigour are conceived in terms of each other, as if the two main modes of knowing had never been separated. The result is an entire, and entirely unexpected, bewitchment.

                                                                   — Clive James
Even Edgar’s admirers cannot have been expecting such a tour-de-force as Lost in the Foreground. Virtuosity of technique is combined with original thinking and clarity of presentation. Simply put, this is brilliant poetry, the equal of anything in English today. Australia should welcome the coming-of-age of an important talent.

                                                                   — Peter Porter

 Part of the Picaro Press Aegis Series: keeping the best poetry in print.

The Post-Man Letters,

Peter Lach-Newinsky ($15.00)

This first collection is a significant achievement. There is richness of almost every kind — in form, subject matter, breadth of thought, diction, voice, experimentation, erudition, word play. There is also grace, beauty and profundity.

                                       — Deb Westbury

From the Picaro New Work Series, developed through the Varuna Publisher Fellowship Program

Rockclimber's Hands, Peter Coghill ($15.00)

Peter Coghill’s Rockclimber’s Hands is so deft and assured you could be excused for thinking he was already a mid-career poet, but to realise this is his first volume makes the poems even more astounding. His precision and technical control, his range of subjects, his acute and steadfast intellect give this work vitality and gleam. His paeans to nature and to the everyday have a quiet, unobtrusive force. For its formal richness and beautifully calibrated lines, this is a wonderfully impressive first book.

                                                             — Judith Beveridge

From the Picaro New Work Series, developed through the Varuna Publisher Fellowship Program

The Green Fuse, Carmel Williams, Ed. ($15.00)

Poetry — says Carol Ann Duffy — is the place in language where we are most human. Carmel Williams has been listening to poets from across Australia, and brings us 41 citizens of that most human place in a book that is conversation and exploration, sorrow and dancing, humour and desire, mystery, delight — the green fuse — all that poetry can be.

                                   — Peter Bishop, Creative Director
                                       Varuna – the Writers’ House

This is an important new national anthology, brilliantly edited, encompassing established and emerging voices from Perth through Townsville, from Tasmania to Alice Springs.  Such collections don't happen often.  One hundred pages of very good reading, and at an affordable price.

Developed in cooperation with the Varuna Writers' Centre, and the Byron Bay Writers Festival, as part of the Picaro Poetry Prize for 2010.

Knowing Vincent, Marian Spires ($15.00)

               I’ll give you not the timelessness of a moment
               but a moment of timelessness
 
Reading these poems is like being guided through an exhibition. Vivid and disparate, the guides are the voices of some of the women who featured in van Gogh’s life and art. In the process, Vincent is lifted out of the stilled frame of history into moments of the timelessness he so celebrated and painted.
 
                                           — Patricia Sykes

From the Picaro New Work Series

Barefoot, Jennifer Compton ($15.00)

Jennifer was born in New Zealand in 1949, moved to Australia in 1972, and lived in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales for many years before relocating to Melbourne.  Her poetry provokes and delights in roughly equal measure: ‘Cool eye, warm heart, sharp bite,’ as Anna Volska observes on the back cover of her third book Blue.  In recent years Jennifer has travelled in Italy, and in the countries which used to be Yugoslavia.  Barefoot is her fifth book of poetry.

From the Picaro New Work Series

Gil Scott Heron is On Parole, Maxine Clarke ($15.00)

Maxine Clarke is a woman with something 'very real' to say ... she invites you to read, listen, and above all participate.         

                                                    — Alan Wearne

i love her perspectives.  I love her rhythms.  I love her images.  I love the perspective she's steeped in.    

                                                    — ∏.O.  

From the Picaro New Work Series

Alone at Last! Evan Jones ($15.00)

Evan Jones has been a significant influence on Australian poetry for more than half a century; his first book, Inside the Whale, was published in 1960. His early work was distinguished by its formal credentials, and he is still known for his metrical control. Geoff Page points out, though, that Evan’s central characteristic is versatility, enhanced by a warm, wry, sometimes gutsy good humour. Picaro Press is delighted to present a collection of new, accessible, and thoroughly enjoyable work from an established player. Evan’s seminal Understandings, 1968, is also available as part of our Art Box Series.

From the Picaro New Work Series

Oblivion, Stephen Clendinnen ($15.00)

Promising new work from an emerging Melbourne voice of exceptional promise.  

Red in the Middle, Steve Woodbury ($15.00)

This poetry takes you out of the comfort zone to places you avoid when you can. It connects small, distasteful deeds that we have all performed — killing a cockroach, squashing a mosquito — to big issues of ethics and fate on which we would rather speculate in the abstract than confront in real life. Reconnoiter in these pages the realms of denial. It will do you good.

                                                 — Gary Schwartz, art historian

god preserve me from those who want what is best for me

Kit Kelen ($15.00)

Kelen’s droll metaphysics float moodily through an especially ironic air. They are thoughtful, conceptual and worldly – a tonic for a tired world.
                                                                                        – Pam Brown

With wit and a mordant humour Christopher Kelen contemplates the big issues and the little moments of a lifetime, and we share with him the crazy but always appealing variousness of the world and our place in it.
                                                                                      – Tom Shapcott

Seeking an admirable simplicity, Kelen’s poetry is thoughtfully colloquial, but those thoughts range complexly from poetic predecessors such as Homer to the seasons and the concept of the nation. He sees poetry as the means by which ‘silence can be spoken’ and the only way of building ‘for tomorrow’.                            

                                                                                      – Dennis Haskell

Leaving the Bow:

the 2008 Henry Kendall Award Anthology ($15.00)

Judged by Newcastle and Josephine Ulrick Prize winning poet/publisher David Musgrave

First Prize: Louise Oxley, for 'Border Country'

Second Prize: Michael Sharkey, for 'Nothing to it'

Third Prize: Madelaine Dickie, for 'Wolves in the Head'

And many, many more.  Leaving the Bow is the eleventh in a series from the Central Coast Poets, stretching back to 1989.  Strong poetry, edited by Andrea Belvoir, Kelly Blaney-Murphy, Shirley Hotchkiss and Jackie Pearson. 

Sunblind, Geoff Lemon ($15.00)

A surprising and very likely award-winning debut collection from an established Melbourne performer.  Over 400 copies sold since its launch in November 2008! This one is special... and it's printed on top quality 100% recycled paper.

Depot Girl, Shé Hawke ($20.00)

Shortlisted for the 2009 Colin Roderick Award

Shé Hawke’s poetry is spontaneous, alive, gritty, lyrical. It grips with pincers, hurts and releases with an eiderdown softness. Don’t be fooled by ‘tags’ or preconceived notions. Her poetry is exciting, vibrant and deserves to be known better. Hopefully, Depot Girl will travel far beyond the depot!                

                                                          — Peter Skrzynecki

When I was first faced with Depot Girl I thought: oh my gawd, not poetry, not lesbians, not a bus driving lesbian in far flung NSW, not ancient Greek myths, not another sad tale of betrayal ... Depot Girl is all these things and much, much more. It’s a rivetting, galloping, entrancing, enthralling, amazing read.

                                                            — Professor Elspeth Probyn

Reality Dreams — Ouyang Yu ($15.00)

These unsettling, breezily imaginative poems are reminiscent of deep-night jottings in an analysand’s bedside notebook. In Reality Dreams Ouyang Yu cooks up something much more complex than a simple surrealist recipe. Once you enter his dreamworld, his stunning imagery never lets you drift off. This poetry is perplexing, comical, sometimes elegiac, sometimes mysterious, often frankly visceral, sexy and sensual. Here, in one world-weary reverie, Australia is ‘so deadly boring, so boringly dead’ that we can only hope that a fearsome Chinese phantom might suddenly awaken the entire place by shouting thunderously loudly, ‘Onya Ouyang!’
                                                                                 — Pam Brown

Poetry Without Borders,

Michelle Cahill, ed.  ($12.50)

Superb new work from Judith Beveridge, Ouyang Yu, Jude Aquilina, Boey Kim Cheng, Tatjana Lukic, Afeif Ismael. Nora Krouk, Adam Aitken, Heather Taylor Johnson, Kerry Leves, Jill Jones, Diane Fahey, Fadeel Kayat, Maria Freij, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Yahia Al-Samawy, Jane Gibian, Mark Tredinnick, Miriam Wei Wei Lo, ... and many, many more!

An abundant collection, an intelligent collection, whose poems range in focus across the personal, the cultural, the geographical, the political, the metaphysical, the ‘spiritual’.

                                                                                                           — joanne burns

Beetroot

Months navigating fat-gut submarines          through a landsea of compost, they have        erected phallus periscopes in this feminist garden.

Irresistible then to pull them into light from   worm-dark ... equalise them in the boiling pot    and afterwards                                      

        scrape off old-blood barnacles,                  peel away each knob and hardened callous,      fault lines lava under female fingers.

Unearthed at last!  disarmed and adorable        crimson-shiny little boys; circumcised and steaming from their bath.

Rogue Perspectives

Rob Riel ($12.50)

Rob Riel's poetic intelligence has a puckish quality, a zest and a versatility of form, subject, and tone...  Whether he is being playful, whimsical, ruminative or lyrical his microscopic eye for the particular and intricate offers the reader fresh images, insights, and surprises, often in the manner of a metaphysical conceit.  Rob Riel could make you see weeds in pavement cracks in a new light.

                           — joanne burns

from Island Press

Wish

When the time finally comes      

I would rather the coroner          

do my autopsy backwards.      

Admire the many organs            

which soldiered on indifferent        

to adjacent trauma, cherish           

the blood which wasn't spilled,  

honour those warm recesses          

that the cancer couldn't reach.        

Let his many forms and records 

celebrate the undefeated flesh.      

We are more than our wounds.

For As Long               As You Burn

Rob Riel        $8.00

Rob Riel's poems have the distinction of being written from art and need, both.  Riel is a sensualist and a romantic; he can turn on a dime towards laughter, beauty, the surreal, or simple truth.  His first book is a paen to the bright gold light of our lost innocence.                 

                                     — Carol Frost

From the Five Islands Press New Poets Series Six.

This Heat

Two days after the stroke

which tossed him thrashing,         foam-flecked and blind across           the hardwood floor, I remember       my dog                                    coming home from the vet,       innocent and doomed,                       his wide brown eyes filled with apology      

for how his hind legs                     now worked so badly,

and how the shame burned me        

to be loved like that.