Studio Moon: (Salt Modern Poets)

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 (a version of Schiller's 'A Maiden from Afar', for example, is set in a hamburger joint in Los Angeles), borrowings from Matthew Arnold and Barbara Guest, an ode, a three-page poem in sapphic stanzas, a computer-based pastiche, two deeply-felt elegies, two sestinas, four haibun, eight pantoums, and dozens of others, all imbued with Tranter's trademark blend of wit, style and feeling. John Tranter is an important writer in mid-career. He has published twenty-one books - four collections of work by others totalling over a thousand pages, and seventeen collections of his own writing, including "Late Night Radio" (Polygon, Edinburgh, 1998), "Different Hands", a group of seven fiction pieces (Salt Publications, Cambridge, 1998), "The Floor of Heaven", a book-length sequence of four interlinked verse narratives (Arc, UK, 2001), "Heart Print" (Salt Publications, Cambridge, 2001) and "Borrowed Voices" (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002). He compiled and edited (with Philip Mead) the "Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry". He is the publisher and editor of the much talked about literary quarterly Jacket, at jacketmagazine.com, which has received more than a third of a million visits from readers around the world.

Table of Contents:
After Hölderlin Five Modern Myths After Laforgue Chinese Poem, after Mark Ford Brussels Address to the Reader The Seasons Spring Summer Autumn Winter After Rilke Invitation to America On La Cienega Festival Night Grover Leach The Green Buick God on a Bicycle At The Florida Dark Harvest Ariadne on Lesbos Days in the Capital Anyone Home? The Romans The Moths Storm over Sydney Opus Dei North Woods Moonshine Sonata Elegy, after James Schuyler Elegy The Other Side of the Bay The Twilight Guest Paid Meridian Trastevere See Rover Reach In Praise of Sandstone Shelter Bay Christopher Brennan (1870–1932) Epitaphs The Will Three Poems about Kenneth Koch Her Shy Banjo Capital Flow Black Sugar The New Season’s Patterns Like Advertising Rimbaud in Sydney This New Town The Morning After The Waiting Room Amulet Curriculum Vitae Journey Falling Decalcomania A Man and a Woman A Marriage Notes

About the Author :
John Tranter is a leading Australian poet. He has been employed mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making reading tours to more than forty venues in the USA, England and Europe. He has lived in London and Singapore, and now lives in Sydney.

Review :
... the new poems are exciting, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously powerful, entertaining and revealing. What Studio Moon gives us is a conspectus of one of Australia's greatest poets in mid-career ... As in Tranter's work generally, there is energy aplenty. Tranter's essential verbal gift, the core of his technique, is his ability to convey intensity through rhythm and sound ... -- Martin Duwell Australian Book Review Tranter's poetry, despite its reputation for abstraction, has always turned to people's lives for its raw material, no matter how freely they are eventually treated. At the same time, it has always had light and dark sides. The celebratory side has usually revolved around popular culture, and this is beautifully expressed in the first poem of this book, 'After Holderlin', a poem that stands as a kind of epigraph to the collection. The speaker celebrates the books and films that rescued him from 'the factory floor / or the office routine': 'These dreams were my teachers / and I learned the language of love / among the light and shadow / in the arms of the gods.' Of course, this is not a simple celebration, and one can feel the tension between the souces of Holderlin's comfort - the gods - and Tranter's. [...] -- Martin Duwell Australian Book Review