1. ‘Our leading transtasman poet.’ Dr Nicholas Reid (Canberra)
Gone: Satirical poems: New & Selected brings together a diverse range of metrical
constructions including villanelles, sonnets, raunchy ballads and whimsical ballades. There is
an invigorating, sardonic edge to Oliver’s poetic, driven by an often oblique and dark humour.
The ballad, for instance, is a demotic form, but it takes a particular skill (one Oliver owns to a
high degree) to write with the kind of verve that enlivens rhythms both comic and colloquial.
Here we have tales of murder, drunkenness and debauchery. We live in the Age of the
Anthropocene. Oliver deftly lampoons a world consumed by its own narcissistic concerns.
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‘Composed over the course of the last few decades, and displaying an enormous range in
voice and form, these poems find focus in the struggle between art and amusement, both with
respect to the writer who creates and the audience that consumes. Consequently, while always
entertaining, the poems also often possess a subtle power to disturb and provoke, an effect
that in the best examples leave you almost feeling guilty for having so much fun while reading
them.’ Jefferson Gaskin—Antipodes
Stephen Oliver—Australasian poet and author of 17 volumes of poetry. Travelled
extensively. Signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the
Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. Free-lanced as production voice, narrator, newsreader,
radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. Lived in Australia for 20 years.
Currently living in NZ. His long narrative poem, Intercolonial, published by Puriri Press,
Auckland, NZ (2013). A transtasman epic. He has published widely in international literary
journals. Regular contributor of creative non-fiction and poems to Antipodes: A Global
Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature. Poems translated into German, Spanish,
Chinese, and Russian. His poem cycle Deadly Pollen, Word Riot Press, USA, 2003, was
recently translated in its entirety (Polen Mortal) by the Chilean poet, Sergio Badilla Castillo
and first published in Nagari (Vol 7 2015). Represented in: Writing To The Wire Anthology,
edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016.
Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected: https://stephenoliverweb.wordpress.com/
For direct PayPal purchase contact Nicholas Reid: reid1801@bigpond.com
Please note the RRP for this title includes postage & shipping.
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GONE
Satirical Poems: New & Selected
Author: Stephen Oliver
Publication date: July 2016
Format: softcover
102 pages
ISBN 978-0-473-36004-7
Greywacke Press
RRP AUD$18.95
Enquiries: tasvagantes@gmail.com
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