'The forty-eight poems that comprise Alex Skovron’s seventh book-length collection, Letters from the Periphery, are populated by a variety of voices speaking across many settings—from 1960s Sydney to the cafés of today’s Melbourne, from the Trojan War and Byzantine Aleppo to the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno, from eighteenth-century Lisbon to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth, from the American Civil War to warfronts of our time, and of the future. A richly diverse gathering, this book also marks Skovron’s return to the longer poem—notably the title-sequence, featuring a mysterious stalker versed in philosophy; the suite ‘The Light We Convert’, grounded in the world of nineteenth-century music; and the poet’s translation of the opening Canto from The Divine Comedy.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'To those who have followed Alex Skovron’s poetry since The Rearrangement (1988), it’s not a surprise to learn that he has been the general editor of an encyclopedia, a book editor, a lover of classical music and chess, an occasional translator of Dante and Borges, and the author of six well-spaced poetry collections, a stylish novella, and a collection of short stories. He can often seem the very embodiment of the European/Jewish/Melburnian intellectual (despite an adolescence spent in Sydney).' (Introduction)
'To those who have followed Alex Skovron’s poetry since The Rearrangement (1988), it’s not a surprise to learn that he has been the general editor of an encyclopedia, a book editor, a lover of classical music and chess, an occasional translator of Dante and Borges, and the author of six well-spaced poetry collections, a stylish novella, and a collection of short stories. He can often seem the very embodiment of the European/Jewish/Melburnian intellectual (despite an adolescence spent in Sydney).' (Introduction)
