Cirrus@Austlit

'Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem's jib, there the poise & rancour of another. 

'For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some moment of last judgement & wave at the gate keeper, a tall and bearded dude, surely a hipster — avant la lettre but also after it — outside of time in fact, where final judgements are, and truth and poetry. You wave it at him. It's a talisman, dude, you say. 'An earnest,' says the figure, 'of your capacity for cool and rigour?' He nods and you smile. You both smile — and he waves you in. ' (Publication summary)

'In Sly Mongoose the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an ‘ordinary punter’, a beaver, a worried mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John Forbes. So there you go.' (Publication summary)