Trio: (Salt Modern Poets)

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.

Table of Contents:
Red Movie The Orange Spot Hospital Balance Bestiary Ward Five The Road Back On the Track of the Attainable Memoirs of a Forty-Year-Old Revolutionary Lesson Julie At The Piccolo Country Girl Sketch for a Portrait of a Young Woman Conversations The Raft Red Movie Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets 1. The Tidal Wave 2. Non-Euclidean Geometry 3. Your Lucky Double 4. Jet Set 5. Ecstasy 6. Model Behaviour 7. F.O. 8. Chloroform 9. The Lilies of the Field 10. Kandehar-Kabul, 1967 11. Fighting the Secret Service 12. The Famous Chinese Poet 13. At the Laundromat 14. (beginning with a line by David Malouf) 15. Korsakoff’s Syndrome 16. Sex Chemistry 17. Surfers Paradise 18. Pickup Truck 19. The Diamond Sutra 20. Double Images 21. The Function of Dreams 22. Triage 23. The Pleasures 24. Jack’s Tracks 25. (after A. de St. Exupery’s Vol de Nuit) 26. Landscape With Automobile 27. Miss Lonelyhearts 28. Barnstorm 29. Ten Statesmen 30. Starlight 31. (after American Graffiti) 32. The Drunk Thug 33. The Training Manual 34. Art 35. Artefact 36. Timing 37. Sediment 38. The Moated Grange 39. Film Noir 40. The Age of Mechanical Reproduction 41. The Bus 42. Toxophilus 43. The Hollywood Version 44. The Lessons 45. Patagonia 46. Two Figures 47. NW1 48. Fashion Shoot 49. Phase Shift 50. (from a BBC synopsis) 51. Trick Ending 52. The Museum 53. Duty 54. I Know a Man Who Lives in the Dark 55. A Hard Art 56. Jungle View 57. The Doll 58. Oenology 59. Absinthe 60. Telescopic Sight 61. The Spy 62. The Exile 63. Ballistics 64. Position: Poet 65. Weather Report 66. The Wine of the Region 67. (after a phrase by Laurie Duggan) 68. The Painting of the Whole Sky 69. The Student Prince 70. The Decline of Narrative Painting 71. The Chicago Manual of Style 72. The Beaches of the Caribbean 73. Winter Cruises 74. The Soto Zen School (for Duncan Ellis) 75. Debt 76. Half Moon 77. Hunting Moon 78. Pedagogy 79. In the Casino 80. Lusaka 81. Going on Your Nerve 82. Night of the Colonels 83. Choice 84. The Rhetoric of Fiction 85. The Knock on the Door 86. Writing for Television 87. Scuba, the Acronym 88. Thermal Drift 89. The Blues 90. 1968 91. The Chev 92. Egyptian Reggae 93. Tropics 4. On the Right Bank 95. A Drink by the Pool 96. Hobo, Computer 97. Note Found in a Bottle 98. Fever 99. Dictation 100. The Blue Mirror Dazed in the Ladies Lounge Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy The False Atlas The Wine Bar Women American Women The Un-American Women Nineteen Fifty-eight Women The Revolutionaries Butterfly Leavis at The London Hotel Sartre at Surfers Paradise Foucault at The Forest Lodge Hotel Roland Barthes at the Poets’ Ball Enzensberger at Exiles Bookshop Apolitical Poem Telephone Radio Traffic 1: Lipstick Radio Traffic 2: Flak Static Radio Traffic 3: Foxtrot Radio Traffic 4: Tricycle The Wind The Germ Moonshine Lipographia Literaria The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile Ode to Col Joye

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.