Circus Apprentice

In her new collection, Katherine Gallagher draws on a rich inheritance from her different worlds: Australia, Britain - particularly London - and France. Her subject matter ranges widely: travel, exile, returning, change, nature, war, family, illness, love, loss, death and childhood experiences, always rooted in a passionate sense of discovery and attention to place. She juxtaposes a mix of colloquial and more formal verse-styles to evoke immediacy and feeling with impressive clarity and freshness of voice. Lyrical and politically-tuned, her poems range between moments of deep feeling and satire, laced with an often wry humour veering towards the surreal. Many of the poems take the traveller as theme - 'traveller' in the widest sense, linking Gallagher's personal experience to the universal and showing the juxtapositions and layers to be discovered behind the seemingly familiar as well as the unknown. She has a great fascination with the natural world, its vibrancy and colour - expressed in moments of wonder and unease, as in her poems on environmental themes and in the eclectic sequence, "After Kandinsky" with which the collection concludes. Her reflections on people draw in the multifariousness of everyday experience with wit, irony and elegance. "Circus-Apprentice" is an engaging, distinctive collection notable for its variety and seriousness, its adventurousness with word and image, and its sometimes understated, but sharply telling, content. Gallagher's poems combine candour and tenderness, humour and dark moments to tremendous effect.

Table of Contents:
I Entente Laanecoorie The Year of the Tree Hedge Summer Odyssey Under Threat Bonfire Night From the Sahel Documentary Les Gorges du Tarn Inscape This One Is Called Blaze Winter Hyacinths Haiku Hybrid Tangents Thinking of my Mother on her Anniversary Gwen John Swims the Channel II Circus Apprentice Keeper Oceanic Cat-Woman The Race GM Scientist Graffitist Tanka for Monsieur Pognon The Invalid Priests Mr. Vyner Girl on a Bolting Horse I've Dog III On the Pass from Kathmandu At Delphi Learning Red Finding the Prince Love Cinquains Sul Lago d'Orta Epithalamium IV The Lesson Talisman Arriving at Boarding School The Thread Dancing on the Farm The Last War Itinerant Planes Tanka Trip Back Eyescape Cloud-eye V After Kandinsky - Grey Forms (1922) - In the Black Square (1923) - Horizontal (1924) - Contrasting Sounds (1924) - Blue Painting (1924) - Yellow, Red, Blue (1925) - Balancing (1925) - Tension in Red (1926) - Homage to Grohmann (1926) - Counterweights (1926) - Points Along the Arc (1927) Biographical note

About the Author :
Katherine Gallagher was born in 1935 in Maldon, Victoria, graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1963 and taught in Melbourne for five years before moving to Europe, living first in London and then in Paris for nine years. In 1979, she moved back to London, working as a secondary teacher and, after 1990, as a poetry tutor for the Open College of the Arts, Jackson's Lane and Barnet College London. During this time, she co-edited 'Poetry London' as well as working extensively with primary school children. In 1978, she was awarded a Writer's Fellowship from the Literature Board, Australia Council, and in 1981, she won the Brisbane Warana Poetry Prize. Her book 'Passengers to the City' (1985) was shortlisted for the Australian National Poetry Award. She also writes children's poetry and many of her children's poems have appeared in anthologies. Katherine Gallagher is Education Officer for Writers Inc / Blue Nose and was Writer in Residence at Railway Feilds Nature Reserve, Harringay, London, July-October, 2002.

Review :
'For Katherine Gallagher it is poetry, rather than her native Australia or her adoptive England that is "this country you keep coming back to / that walks you home to yourself". There is much to relish on this "walk": poems of delicate perception and tenderness, the marvellously resonant "Laanecoorie" and the sequence "After Kandinsky", the collection's fascinating, intricate finale.' Moniza Alvi