SELECTED POEMS by Evan Jones
Evan Jones is a notable senior Australian poet whose underrated status deserves to be rectified. This volume contains a generous selection of his published work, spanning more than half a century. Marked by clarity, formal versatility and technical command, Jones’ poetry celebrates family, love, friendship, the ordinary and extraordinary in daily living – and does so with honesty, wit and panache. An astute observer, he can also be a challenging political poet, as witnessed by his strange, visionary narrative ‘A Dream of Barricades’ published here in full.
THE BLUE DECODES by Cassie Lewis
After two decades-plus of quiet yet pointed observations in both Australia and the United States, THE BLUE DECODES is poetry by a woman speaking for herself and just as importantly about her generation, a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented. Yet, as Cassie Lewis advises throughout her work, all that optimistic blue we once saw beckoning can be regained, decoded if you will, that we may become our original, authentic selves.
WITH THE YOUNGSTERS – A COLLECTION OF GROUP SESTINAS & GROUP VILLANELLES Alan Wearne, Editor
Alan Wearne, publisher of Grand Parade Poets and editor of WITH THE YOUNGSTERS writes: The 23 sestinas and 22 villanelles contained in this volume are the result of group work involving my poetry classes 1998-2016. And if they started as teaching exercises showing students how to construct the highly formulaic sestina and villanelle, this initial reason was soon shed and the imagination gained control. For at their best these verse forms aren’t so much rule-bound as possessed of rules made for bending and breaking.
As snapshots of what collections of people were thinking and imagining at a particular time, a lot of virtually useless artifacts may have been created, except for this: they were written to entertain and when entertainment is imaginative and challenging it’s nothing like useless.
Indeed, how do we know that group participation wasn’t the basis for the ballads and epics of earlier times? Are these poems ‘the future’ of poetry? Probably not, though they may be more of ‘a future’ than plenty of verse being practiced today in Australia let alone throughout the English writing world.
WHIRLWIND DUSTSTORM by John Hawke
All poetry, not just Australian poetry, is always in need of products that supply art, intellect and satiric bite. This is why Grand Parade Poets is very pleased to announce the publication of Whirlwind Duststorm, a new volume of poetry by John Hawke, which certainly possesses all three.
Consciousness is like the experience of the poem – of being in perpetual motion, constantly distracted by the images before us. Embroiled in this storm, we are travelling, pummelled, unable to find firm footing, and yet shaped and honed by different influences, some of which are merely peripheral, and many of which emerge from class. Identity, personal history and narrative are called into question, leaving us with the poem as the only permanence.
“Whirlwind Duststorm points at an answer to Hölderlin’s question about the purpose of poets in destitute times.” – Liam Ferney
“Wondrously evokes each precarious profit and loss that crams this multilayered world.” – Gig Ryan
John Hawke’s previous volume, Aurelia (Cordite 2015), received the Anne Elder award.
