Outside: (Salt Modern Poets)

Outside is the second full-length collection from the prize-winning poet David McCooey. Outside takes the most basic of categories – day and night, inside and outside – and makes them the source of powerful meditations on the strangeness of our diurnal lives. In the resonant landscapes of these poems, the domestic slides into the universal, the personal becomes the historical, and the cultural is the real. This is a deeply unified work, even as it encompasses reflections on such diverse topics as the number 5, hands, newborn infants, heaven, anger, and rock music. The collection also features a number of major sequences, including `A Short History of Night’, and an electrifying response to the films of Stanley Kubrick. The book is also finely balanced in another way: by a generous and unique sense of humour, demonstrated in the dadaist and hilarious `intermission’. Outside is always unsettling, but it is, too, always humane.

Table of Contents:
One Another Dream A.M. Exteriors Landscape/Psyche Illness Hands, 5 Two Figures Heaven Yield Car Memory & Slaughter Drinking with My Brother On Wasting Time There Blackbird Summer Rock Music Trains Travelling Inca Kola Intermission Rejected New Yorker Cartoons More Mutant Proverbs Two Found Poems Shorts Two Migration Night Frequencies Evening Sleep Night Light Trio of Dips An Obscene Poem American Movie After Kubrick Curse Anger (Weldon Kees) A Short History of Night

About the Author :
David McCooey is an award-winning, and widely published, poet and critic. His first collection of poetry, Blister Pack, won the Mary Gilmore Award and was short-listed for four other major Australian literary awards. He is the Deputy General Editor of the award-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (published internationally as The Literature of Australia). He is associate professor at Deakin University in Victoria.

Review :
In David McCooey's latest collection, a chapbook honouring filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and memoir-poems from his own childhood, there is a line, "the primitive violence of eating." That's the kind of killer line McCooey always nails. The gentle folk of polite society may make a dinner party the most civilised of events, but it's just primitive violence when you look at someone chewing. McCooey in a few words evokes the whole awful spectacle. He reminds us that everything, even beauty, is the sum of a whole lot of little violences. His gift--to get a detail in one shot, one brief line, not a word out of kilter--is the hallmark of his imagery.I would rather read his poetry than that of anyone else of his generation.--Craig Sherborne The poems in Graphic take strength and originality from the way they combine opposites. On the one hand, studies of Kubrick films and animal slaughter, they are straightforwardly fierce; but they achieve their effects in a manner remarkably controlled and subtle. They work with short lines and understatement, yet they are forever surprising you with brilliant images and perceptions. In fact, they recall Raymond Carver in the way their tone is intimate, but their effect uncanny.--Lisa Gorton