Cirrus@Austlit

'CRANIAL BUNKER follows on from GONE / Satirical Poems: New & Selected (2016); Luxembourg (2018); The Song of Globule / 80 Sonnets (2020) and Unposted, Autumn Leaves / A Memoir In Essays (2021) all through Greywacke Press. This work contains a generous suite of prose poems alongside lyrical, philosophic, and epigrammatic compositions that demonstrate the ‘strength and reach’ of Oliver’s poetry.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Oliver's 'Unposted, Autumn Leaves: A Memoir In Essays' begins with his childhood growing up in the hilly suburb of Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New Zealand, in the '50s and'60s. He attended St. Bernard's Primary School, Brooklyn, then Marist Brothers, Newtown, and finally, St. Patrick's College, Cambridge Terrace. This period is extensively covered, including his post-schooldays, right through to the close of the '60s, in a Wellington that no lonfer exists, captured in the essays Chalk, Talk and Asphalt Days, 'A Big Fruity Guy ...', A Small Matter of Demolition, A Nostalgia for Books, and Gnosis, A Spark.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'THE SONG OF GLOBULE. These 80 sonnets pursue the oneiric preoccupations of a young female protagonist living in Sydney who, if not suffering from multiple personality disorder, is certainly a fantasist. Her sensibilities are continuously informed by a chorus of legendary heroines, both real and mythological. Globule, it must be remembered, is a shape-shifter who glides seamlessly between past, present and future. Oliver’s rendering of Ovid’s fifteen epistolary poems, Heroides, into the closing sonnets of this book, integral to the vertiginous journey of our heroine, is nothing less than a tour de force.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Stephen Oliver is one of Australasia's major poets. If in earlier collections he took on the great modernist, post-romantic themes (questions of whether the landscape speaks, and of the roles of memory and of the poet), here in Luxembourg the poems are more personal, exploring emotions raised by a return to New Zealand after 20 years in Australia. Oliver is one of those poets who make us see the world, in all its particulars, anew--a poet whose depth of imagination is everywhere apparent, an imagist whose poems catch consciousness at its very margins.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Gone: Satirical poems: New & Selected brings together a diverse range of metrical constructions including villanelles, sonnets, raunchy ballads and whimsical ballades. There is an invigorating, sardonic edge to Oliver’s poetic, driven by an often oblique and dark humour. The ballad, for instance, is a demotic form, but it takes a particular skill (one Oliver owns to a high degree) to write with the kind of verve that enlivens rhythms both comic and colloquial. Here we have tales of murder, drunkenness and debauchery. We live in the Age of the Anthropocene. Oliver deftly lampoons a world consumed by its own narcissistic concerns.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.