Backtrack, BN Oakman’s third full-length collection, is a suite of poems created in response to an observed, often baffling, world. Oakman writes with conviction in a direct and lively style, while employing various poetic forms to explore a wide range of emotions and experiences. He gives us poems crafted with empathy and humour about transient joys, abiding sadnesses, persistent injustices, fleeting triumphs and unassuageable grief – the whole exasperating mess and muddle of it all. Here are poems to engage the mind, touch the heart, nudge us to laughter, and occasionally, move us to tears.
BN Oakman’s first book with IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) was In Defence of Hawaiian Shirts (2006).
This was followed by Second Thoughts and the audiobook What Did I Know.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
From Madrid to Finisterre by way of a morning chorus of magpies Oakman’s poetry speaks with grace and power to the insistence of history and memory but above all to the crucial importance of love.
– Valerie Krips, author, The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage and Childhood in Postwar Britain
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Eschewing the ‘contorted subject matters’ and ‘tortured’ language of his former academic colleagues ¬– as well as of many of his fellow poets writing today – Bruce Oakman is not afraid of being comprehensible. Yet there’s nothing clichéd, simplistic or predictable about his poems. They invest all kinds of everyday themes with a wry subtlety of perception, and a voice as elegant as it’s earthy. Enjoy their ‘expansive splendour’.
– Ian Britain, The Making of Donald Friend: Life & Art
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
The poetry in Backtrack is wonderfully unflinching in its focus on loss, injustice and the pain of living our mortal, loving lives. Humour and tenderness are in steady attendance, but it is the poet’s commitment to the truly well-made poem which is the fundamental source of delight. Rich imagery and a narrative skill supported by a beautifully subtle syntactical flare are the bedrock qualities at work here. To read through this deeply moving collection is to experience the unique Oakman blend of intelligence, craftmanship and compassion ‘burning away the dark’.
– Ross Gillett, Swimmer in the Dust