The Art Box Series
Quality reprint editions from Picaro Press
Good poetry just doesn't stay in print as long as it should. Some of the very best work done in Australia over the last few decades is no longer available. Picaro Press is working to change that.
Our Art Box Series aims to provide low-cost access to significant Australian poetry titles which, for whatever reason, are no longer generally available to the public. Each volume just costs $15, dometic postage included. Titles in the series to date include:
Judith Beveridge, The Domesticity of Giraffes
Tom Shapcott, Shabbytown Calender
Jan Owen, Blackberry Season
Evan Jones, Understandings
Roger MacDonald, Airship
David Campbell, The Man in the Honeysuckle
Jean Kent, Verandahs
Andrew Lansdown, Waking & Always
Judith Rodriguez, Mudcrab at Gambaro’s
Geoff Page, Smalltown Memorials
Rhyll McMaster, Washing the Money
Available now ... and the series is expected to expand rapidly. Order yours today!
Depot Girl — Shé Hawke
$20.00 (168 pps)
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 (115 pps)
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
Launched at the Sydney Writers' Festival!
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
Vigorous Vernacular – Kevin Densley $12.50
Kevin Densley’s poetry has been published in various Australian and UK magazines over the past fifteen years, including Quadrant, The Adelaide Review, LiNQ, Muse, New England Review, Vernacular, Mattoid, Redoubt, Verandah, Tamba, Space, Other Poetry (UK), The Journal (UK), Cadenza (UK), Monkey Kettle (UK) and Buzzwords (UK). His work has also appeared in two UK anthologies, Miracle and Clockwork: the Best of Other Poetry Series 2 and Now That’s What I Call Monkey Kettle. In addition, he writes plays with Steve Taylor. These have been performed Australia-wide and in the U.S.A. With Steve, he has co-authored twelve books and one CD-Rom — mainly play collections for young people. Their latest book is the play Last Chance Gas, published by Currency Press in 2003.
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
Jack – Judy Johnson $25.00 (302 pps)
Winner the Victorian Premier's Award
*** Featured on ABC Radio National's Poetica Program ***
Judy Johnson’s Jack is right up there with the best – with Dorothy Porter’s and Les Murray’s and Alan Wearne’s.
— Chris Pollnitz
The book takes us on the ‘wild mouse’ of sea, treasure, sex and hallucination. Only great poetry — and a terrific storyteller in Judy Johnson — can do this with such panache.
— Dorothy Porter
Now available in a new edition from Picador! And also as an audio book from Bolinda Books, $29.95 at good bookstores everywhere.
Exit Wounds – Heather Taylor Johnson
$12.50 (60 pps)
Exit Wounds circulates with life and warmth. It is a mighty celebration of birth, living, and perhaps dying ... These poems are sensuous, full of precise recall, and leave the reader in a thoroughly celebrative mood.
— Thomas Shapcott
These poems on birth, motherhood, love and death have intimacy and raw warmth — and a fresh wonder at inner and outer worlds.
— Eva Sallis
Swan Song – Philip Hammial
$15.00 (103 pps)
Outlandish, fabulous episodes that delight in the implausible . . .
— Warwick Wynne
Philip's 17th volume – top quality prose poetry, at an affordable price.
tender muse
– Carolyn Van Langenberg and Shé Hawke $12.50 (72 pps)
Elegies for friends, lovers and those who have become strangers, these are poems of lost opportunities from which something else is wrested, giving rise to a reinvention of the lyric and its rediscovery in the small ironies of the present.
— Anna Gibbs
An impressive debut collaboration!
Nomadic – Judy Johnson
$20.00 (111 pps)
Judy Johnson's poems are strong and sure-footed. The world has presence: animals, voices, histories, objects are all given existence through her remarkable understanding and curiousity. This is a poetry at once worldly and refined. — Judith Beveridge
'This powerful collection deals eloquently and humanely with the difficulties of experience. There are many fine psychological studies, taking us into worlds of childhood and adult pain, while being equally sensitive to private rapture. I am struck by how much gets into these poems – how much openness, how much imagination.' — Peter Boyle
Published by Black Pepper Press — winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Award, and contains winning poems from nine major competitions including the Josephine Ulrick Prize, the Val Vallis Award, the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize.
Wing Corrections Judy Johnson
$8.00 (32 pps)
To steal and misquote from Virginia Woolf: Johnson's poems are butterfly wings threaded with steel.
— Roland Leach
Now in its third printing, Johnson's prizewinning first collection has been used in schools. Published by Five Islands Press as part of their New Poets Series 5; signed by the author on request.
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 (pps)
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 (32 pps)
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.
