Commended, Best Poetry, IP Picks 2006.
Andrew Leggett’s second collection is stark, bare and unforgettable. In these interconnecting poems, by equal measure serious and darkly comic, the ugly is united with the beautiful to produce a unique aesthetic.
Popular culture provides the surreal framework for the author’s meditations on death, loss and loneliness, creating a moving overture to playfully grim explorations into religion and the afterlife.
Andrew Leggett is a Brisbane poet who works as a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. His work has been widely published in magazines, professional journals, newspapers and anthologies throughout Australia, the UK, the USA and New Zealand. His first collection, Old Time Religion and Other Poems, was published by Interactive Press in 1998. The manuscript of his second collection, Dark Husk of Beauty, was Highly Commended in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Award in 2005, Commended in the national IP Picks 2006 manuscript competition and has formed the main body of his Master of Philosophy dissertation in Creative Writing. He was also a prize winner in the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award in 2004. Andrew also writes fiction, essays, book reviews and scientific papers on medical ethics, social research in psychiatry and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. His interests in psychoanalysis, literature, film, mythology, cultural studies, aesthetics and the visual and performing arts provide a matrix for passionate expression in his writing.
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Heather Taylor Johnson’s poetry captures the immediacy of a crisp Rocky Mountains landscape and the moments of intimacy we wish we could freeze-frame.
This is a celebration of clean air, snow and sunflowers, and a home divided between two continents, but it’s mostly about the vibrancy and transforming power of love.
Japanese people cherish the tanka form as much now as they did in ancient times. And for English-speaking people, this anthology will provide an excellent way of experiencing tanka as English poetry.
“These are poems that go beyond the limits of words. By wrestling with the poems in 3rd i, by engaging with them, the world is more intensely lived. This guy is offering us everything. This is heroic poetry.” — John Marsden
Jest the Funny Bits is a collection of Bill’s comic poems, plays and short stories. He had a lot of fun writing them and he really hopes you have fun reading them. However, spoiler alert, they’re not for everyone. If you’re a humourless sour grumpy-pants, whose face would split in two if you attempted to smile or laugh, then, whatever you do, don’t read this book!
In Oh My Rapture, Gemma White draws on her own lived experiences with bipolar, and her attempts to transcend it through the power of her imagination and the creation of art. Entwined throughout the poems in this collection are allusions to themes in The Red Hand Files, as every poem is a direct response to a different file.
That old childhood saying ‘pick what you want from the tree of life’ simply not working anymore? Becoming a foreigner in Indonesia might be as good a stab at something new and rewarding, as anything…
If you are the only one capable of saving the world, would a hedgehog be your go-to solution? Should you commit seppuku simply because you feel at home everywhere? How much trouble could you be in, if you imagine that most people you meet are your concubines? What if you find out that God occasionally indulges in writing dirty poems? These questions seem absurd. However, before passing judgment, you might discover the surprising poetic resolutions that Daniel Ionita proposes in this volume.
More Lies is a highly referential comedy thriller about a writer being held hostage in their own apartment and forced to type to hide the manoeuvres of a femme fatale, holding a pearl handled gun, and her brother, a small-time thug with big time ambitions.
The Fickle Pendulum assays belief and doubt through three historical figures – St. Thomas the Apostle, Galileo Galilei and Laura (Riding) Jackson – and uses them to pivot into wider thematic worlds The writing is thoughtful, exploratory and never weighed down by its subject matter, and the language vibrant and rich in metaphor.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
A wild ride of angels, monsters, slapstick and pop. In this not so divine comedy actress Isabella Rosselini becomes Leggett’s post-modern Beatrice. A book that begins and ends with angels and recalls the spirit of Yeats’ Crazy Jane:
‘For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
– Craig Powell