Cirrus@Austlit

'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

'David Malouf's brilliant collection of poems begins with a memory of new love - with 'grace unasked for, urgencies that boom under the pocket of a shirt' - and ends in the intimate territory of the long-familiar where there is no need for words. This volume is marked by an astonishing breadth of intelligence and erudition, yet steps lightly among the objects of our lives and the wonder of everyday replenishments. Everywhere the poems affirm the mystical delights of music, angels and fields where 'first to gather are the starlings in unquiet flocks. Then quietly, the stars'.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.