Biographical note: David McCooey was born in 1967 and has lived in Australia since 1970. He is the author of the prize-winning critical work, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography. As well as a poet, he is one of Australia’s leading poetry critics. He is a senior lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University and the associate editor of Space: New Writing.
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EAN13: 9781844710522 ISBN-10: 1844710521 ISBN-13: 9781844710522 Author: David McCooey Title: Blister Pack Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Mar-05 Extent: 112pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 7 mm Weight: 168 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 8.99 Price: USD 14.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation: David McCooey is an elegist of the everyday. His poems combine minimalism and intensity, elegance and emotion. Finely crafted and edged with wit, they offer a kind of unsentimental nostalgia, a passionate irony. Blister Pack is a first collection of immense control and variety which has the haunting resonance of music.
Main description: The calendar discreetly points out that our days are numbered.
David McCooey is an elegist of the everyday. His poems combine minimalism and intensity, elegance and emotion. Finely crafted and edged with wit, they offer a kind of unsentimental nostalgia, a passionate irony. Blister Pack is a first collection of immense control and variety which has the haunting resonance of music.
Table of contents: Part I Occupations Questions in Philosophy French with Tears [1] Raison d’être [2] Je-ne-sais-quoi [3] Noblesse oblige [4] Une blessure [5] Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose [6] À propos de rien [7] Déjà vu [7] Déjà vu Signal-to-Noise Ratio Evening On Something Circus Oz The Developed World Seen from a Train Distance Melbourne Cup Day Late Summer : Sydney Home Beautiful Sunday Night Grief Garlands What Light Is Autobiographical Metaphor The Same River The Story’s End His Hands Left Hand Right Hand After a Line Abandoned by Chris Wallace-Crabbe Boarding School Part II Domestic Elegies What to do with the Evenings (i) God What to do with the Evenings (ii) ‘We are dark water’ ‘Thinned out by age’ ‘You decided that’ ‘Their green desires’ Succedaneum (i) ‘If the message on the piece of paper’ (ii) Delight (iii) Argument (iv) Our Arguments (v) ‘You were always’ (vi) Bitch (vii) ‘Once I came home’ (viii) Love & Anger Last Chances (i) ‘She scans her torch’ (ii) Love Poem (iii) Diurnal (iv) ‘We catch our flights’ Part III A Few Questions Hours A Perfect Heart The Art of Happiness 1. Pointillism 2. Abstract Expressionism 3. Late Minimalism Brief Lives Singles Covers Manifest Mid Life Autobiology Rubber Bullets Ghostly One moment please Distance The Last Summer Facts of Life The Field Bird and Fox Morning Days Hours Night Fragments Part IV For Maria For Maria ‘It has no edges’
The calendar discreetly points out that our days are numbered.
The mountain in the distance writes its brutal contract in stone.
All the nation’s hospitals are filled with ancient pictographs.
The significance of even these simplest of things still keeps evading us,
The daylight that shines through our house, the creatures that bathe in the light.
Unpublished endorsement : David McCooey’s Blister Pack is poetry of a beguiling lyrical clarity. It is immensely pleasurable to read. But underneath its silky rhythms there is a disconcerting and compelling unease.
Dorothy Porter
Unpublished endorsement : How many kinds of weather play over the soul? This is the question David McCooey’s poems ask, steadied by an elegant equanimity. Coping with yet another diurnal tremor, he can wryly reflect that “This is what the suburbs/ Were created for.” These poems acknowledge how everyday experience has discernible limits and, at the same time, that something dark lurks beyond those limits. Civilization is like that.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Review quote: On of the most immediate pleasures of McCooey’s poetry is its formal elegance, its air of composed sensuousness. ‘Beguiling’ is how Dorothy Porter describes its ‘silky rythms’.
Jennifer Strauss Australian Book Review
Review quote: Throughout this collection, there is pleasure in seeing a lucidly articulate intelligence at work. It is a readerly pleasure compounded, not negated, by the poet’s recognition of the limits of experience.
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