Cirrus@Austlit

'There is an amusing asperity. And, for all its judgements, Metropole is rather forgiving. Irresistible, of course-and smart. - Arlo Banens, The Tune

'His work characterised by its 'degree zero' cool, Bolton would seem to have taken his American influences and refined them through an apparatus built of French cinema, nouveau roman, and contemporary art criticism: coolly conversational-but flexibly elastic-this work can contain multitudes. - Peter Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review

'Excellent. - Millie Dickins, Astrolabe

'Morose, counter-intuitive, something of a zany, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1952 Lancia Aurelia, 'Mandy', an image that belies the tales of later suffering - the affairs, the court appearances, the bad teeth - and speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness "where happiness happens to like its poems written best" (in his inordinate phrase).'  (Publication summary)

'On Luck Street builds on The Elsewhere Variations, Nearly Lunch, and Waldo's Game - taking the reader around the corner, and around the world. From a small circus in Nepal, to a florist in New York, and the streets of Coogee and Fitzroy.

'Connivers, chancers, charmers - those trapped and those who would break free. To what extent do any of us trust our luck?'(Publication summary)

'Waldo's Game extends the reach of The Elsewhere Variations and Nearly Lunch - going around the corner, and around the world. From supermarket aisle to art gallery - from nocturnal shiftiness in industrial zones to dawn reckonings ... in bedrooms, on wild coastlines.

'The world as it looks to other people, not all of them looking at the same thing. What are they at? What is their game?' (Publication summary)

'The author's playfulness is to the fore in this strange, charming book. It is a game which invites the reader to roll the dice, take a card from the deck, gain points, lose a turn, and, one way or another, advance around a notional game board: a pirate's world of exotic ports, risky encounters, escapades, wonders and the routine of shipboard life, always in the presence of the moody, changeable sea.' (Publication summary)

 (Publication summary)

'Known for their allusiveness and indirection, Bolton's poems can also be jaw-droppingly direct, as they make their way towards resolutions never clearly within their sights, achieved rather than aimed for. Fantastic Day performs philosophy, history, criticism — all three and satire at the same time, in the dolefully droll Hullo (which considers our literature's ambitions and its very different fortunes) —parody and sincerity, in a strange mutual bind, in Birds of Rome, which looks at Italy or 'travel' while guying the genre 'travel writing' and, while doing so, mounts a show of rebellion against New York. Both poems attempt to negotiate with the international canon.

'The poems in Fantastic Day set out a range of styles and manners: lyric, fractured, discursive. They are frequently funny, regularly beautiful (see the two poems named after jazz tunes, Star Eyes and Ascension), and masterful in wielding a casual, almost idle precision in the service of thinking — thinking about politics (the Letter to John Forbes, A Saturday), about friendship, about time, even aesthetics. The Letter, initially modelled on Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron', treats friendship, time, and a recent Australia — and the same might be said of many of the poems: Briefing Mary Christie, the faux naif account of artist Richard Grayson's life, the Rousselian simulation of artist Shaun Kirby's work, or of Vivienne Miller's. Along the way we meet poems as different as Travellin' Man and Reach & Ambition. The range is considerable, the unity unmistakeable.

'This volume concludes with a remarkable long poem, Wiesengrund, in part a paean to the philosopher Adorno, but as much a dedication to various philosophers and critics (Clement Greenberg, Donald Brook, Cesar Aira, Lucy Lippard) and, in its musical construction, an elegiac account of ... what? ... history, politics, experience.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.