Ruby Street

While I'm looking forward to the progress of The Beautiful Anxiety , I don't want to forget my 7th book, Ash is Here, So are Stars , which was published late 2012 by Ralph Wessman of Walleah Press , and to whom I'm thankful for taking a chance on this little book. And it is a book I am fond of. It was born of a more specific project than The Beautiful Anxiety , in fact, developed from a manuscript which was shortlisted for the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. To that idea I added three slightly older poems which had not found a place in a past book. It gained a few good reviews, mainly online, but seemed to pass most people by. I suspect this was due, partly, to issues of distribution. Although these days you probably won't find it in a bookshop, now it is available easily online, including from The Book Depository , at a decent price, as well as from the publisher if you live in Australia , or overseas . Interestingly, this time around, mostly the reviewers go...

And here's a curiosity. The Copyright Agency has a program called Reading Australia, and as part of it they released their 'Top 200 Australian Literary Titles'. And my name appears not once but twice. First, for an older book of mine, Broken/Open , and then as co-editor with Michael Farrell, of Out of the Box . The full list is available on the Agency's website. Lot's of classic and contemporary Australian titles to consider.

Early next year (though it is out and about now) I publish my 8th full-length book, The Beautiful Anxiety . As the back cover says: The Beautiful Anxiety continually breaks across boundaries of the intimate and the global in an invigorating and unsettling mix of materialist and speculative writing on the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the 21st century. The poems are in turn provocative, tender, impatient, playful, and swerve through the world, awake to its lostness as well as its ‘flesh and spark’. A s well as being a work focused on the material, i t is, in an odd way, a metaphysical work. I know that one is not allowed to talk in such terms these days but I've never been one for doing what I'm supposed to do. I've also taken a chance on using the word 'beautiful' in the title, for which I also expect to be castigated by the poetry and theory police. If one has always been a maverick, one may as wel...