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This volume of essays covers all periods of the published output of John Tranter, one of the key figures in modern Australian poetry. Tranter is widely regarded by critics as the most important member of the so-called 'generation of 68', whose chief impact on Australian literature was in terms of its focus on an international, metropolitan culture whose most appropriate models were to be found in American and, to a lesser extent, French writing. Tranter's cultural significance has been compounded in the last three decades by his activities as anthologist, particularly with "The New Australian Poetry", and "The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry" (with Philip Mead). During the 1990s, he founded the internet poetry magazine "Jacket", undoubtedly the leader in its field. Tranter's work is now published to acclaim in the USA and the UK, as well as in Australia, and yet there is little extended criticism available in book form, and this is the first volume devoted exclusively to his poetry.The essays published here focus on key works in Tranter's career to date, emphasising the importance of his work as editor as well as poet, both in an Australian and in an international context. ... Read more

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The poems in Studio Moon were written over the last fifteen years, and cover a wide range of styles and approaches: poems that are answers to other poets' work, sometimes wrenched out of context, borrowings from Matthew Arnold and Barbara Guest, and dozens of others all imbued with Tranter's trademark blend of wit, style and feeling. ... Read more

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"Trio" is a 162-page omnibus collection of three books of poetry, by leading Australian poet John Tranter, published over a period of wide-ranging stylistic experiment in the 1970s. "Red Movie", John Tranter's second book, published in 1972, reveals a break or shift in his approach to poetry. The first half of the book is made up of a series of moody imagistic landscapes and fragmentary portraits of people reminiscent at times of Robert Lowell, and a memoir of country and urban adolescence. The rhetoric is mainly romantic. The ten-page poem 'Red Movie' which concludes the book moves out into new territory. Its style, though lyrical, is mosaic, seeking its effects in the juxtaposition of bright and contradictory fragments. History, literature and personal experience are broken and reassembled into a patterned montage of words, an approach perhaps influenced by the authors' course-work in linguistics, Gestalt theory and field theory for his academic degree in psychology. "Crying in Early Infancy" (1977) is a collection of one hundred fourteen-line poems. Five are carefully rhymed sonnets, some are solemn, but most are loose and playful and some are exuberantly incoherent.Existentialism, Marxist theory, foreign movies, Hollywood, soft drugs, homosexuality, teenage angst, cool jazz: it all goes into the blender of Tranter's art, and nothing is safe. It was the seventies, after all. "Dazed in the Ladies Lounge" (1979). Among a handful of alternately serious and light-hearted poems three longer works stand out: a study of the influence of Rimbaud, alternately grateful and scolding; a series of imaginary tableaux where five leading European intellectuals are forcibly replanted in an Australian context (Sartre at "Surfers Paradise", for example); and "Ode to Col Joye", a playful look at the author's fellow-poets and his own cultural setting. ... Read more

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This is a fresh collection of energetic and engaging writing. These poems focus sharply on the contemporary world, from the political to the religious, from the public arena to the deeply personal, from 'The aggression of foreign companies ...the survival of the most bastardly is built into the system' to 'Parents were templates, but I could not plot the father ...The tractor did its work like any rusty mechanism and his office was the open air, a church of absence'. As well as twenty-five new poems, "Heart Print" also brings into print over fifty pages of strong, early writing not previously published outside Australia. From the "US Publishers Weekly", March 18, 2002: 'Tranter may now be Australia's most important poet. Since the late '60s, Tranter's cosmopolitan, oddball verse, inspired by John Ashbery and others, has offered a post-modern, hip, slippery challenge to the better-known rural poetics of Les Murray. During the 1990s, Tranter emerged as an international figure, first by editing well-received anthologies, then with the Internet journal Jacket. [...]The untitled set of 28 sonnets and delightful prose poem that conclude ["Heart Print"] present light-fingered commentary on subjects from 'Starlight' to absinthe and middle age: 'I re-live youth asleep', one affecting line admits, 'and leave it behind at dawn'. Readers [...] will see why Tranter has mattered to Australians for so long'. John Tranter is an important writer in mid-career. He has published twenty books, including "Gasoline Kisses" (Equipage, Cambridge, 1997) "Late Night Radio" (Polygon, Edinburgh 1998), "Different Hands", a collection of seven computer-assisted prose pieces (Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998), "The Floor of Heaven", a sequence of four interlinked narrative poems (Arc, 2001), and four anthologies of other writers' work including (with Philip Mead) the 474-page "Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry". He is the publisher and editor of the widely-read Internet literary magazine "Jacket". ... Read more

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Seven strange and disturbing stories - computer-generated collaborations based on pieces by different writers, and shaken, stirred and transformed by the poet John Tranter. In a Norwegian fiord, Biggles clashes passionately with the noted lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall. In the mountains of Japan, Henry Miller struggles to understand the Master of Go. Allen Ginsberg takes the Bobbsey Twins on a raving, drug-soaked trip across America, and Louisa Alcott's "Little Women" suffer perilous mystical experiences in the Mexican desert. John Tranter is the leading modern poet, and editor of Jacket, and internet literary magazine. Alongside his more approachable narrative, lyric and critical work he has persistently explored a project of experimentation, interrogating the traffic between speech, writing and meaning, and challenging the preconceptions of the reader. ... Read more

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The only selected volume of work from this leading Australian poet. ... Read more

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