Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'Via numerous portrait poems of real and fictitious people revealed in Our Ways On Earth Peter Bakowski returns our attention to the individual. Via clear, non-judgemental portraiture Our Ways On Earth saves, for our consideration, individuals who might otherwise be buried, lost to us, under a slag heap of statistics, demographics and generalisation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Sometimes I sit at the kitchen table
at 2 in the morning
and have a go at writing a poem.

'Wardrobe of Selves examines what differentiates our private self from our public self—how often or rarely each of us is candid, driven to reveal our oldest secrets and scars; or calculating, moving through rooms and situations with bravado and ambition; or on the cusp of giving birth to our most remarkable self or conversely jettisoning a limited self which has held us back for too long.

'The real and fictitious individuals portrayed in Wardrobe of Selves represent a spectrum of responses to pivotal human moments of idyll and dilemma, creativity and fury.

'Wardrobe of Selves, Peter Bakowski’s seventh full-length poetry collection, pays homage to: the acrostic poem, aphorisms, blues and roots music, the cities of Berlin, Melbourne and Paris, espionage, film noir, haiku, humour, modern history, pacifism, painting, photography portraiture, proverbs, quotations, the sonnet, surrealism and travel.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Elsewhere Variations is a series of poems by Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton in which themes develop, are abandoned, resurface, where poems answer, continue or oppose each other. The usual thrills of collaborative projects. But these are unusual and will get attention just on that basis - and they are variously funny, mysterious, & occasionally moving.

'There are eight sets of six: forty-eight poems. They begin with a lightly fictionalised account of the poetry wars of inner Melbourne - but from there they undertake a survey of human happiness, ambition and acceptance.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.