Cirrus@Austlit

'In this first collection, Ann Shenfield’s often tentatively articulated thoughts and anecdotes are realized as poems almost in spite of themselves. The little narratives build—and they are narratives rather than lyrical effusions—and they aggregate in effect, expanding to the reader’s attention as though heliotropes responding to the light!' – Kris Hemensley (Publication summary)

'In Apocrypha, Peter Boyle retrieves the luminous classical landscape that is the birthplace of Western civilisation and the Western psyche. Setting out to find the discarded or forbidden parts of this landscape, his search brings to light a forgotten but distinctly classical undercurrent of animism, of a piece, in its intellectual lucidity and precision, with classical science and philosophy. In the retrieved fragments of William O'Shaunessy's "translations", the outer world of poplars, ibis, windmills, commerce and political vagary interflows seamlessly with inner worlds of sorrow, anguish, love and loss to create a sparkling wholeness of meaning and matter that seems utterly lost to the West today. In a way that perhaps only a poet can, however, Boyle shows that this wholeness can be now, as it always was, our own.' - Freya Matthews

Source: Vagabond Press website, http://www.vagabondpress.net/
Sighted: 24/08/2010