Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Peter Minter is a poet, editor and writer living in Sydney, Australia, where he teaches Indigenous Studies at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. His first book Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin was shortlisted for the 1996 New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, he received the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry in 1999, and in 2000 he was awarded The Age Poetry Book of the Year for Empty Texas. He was founding editor of the Varuna New Poetry broadsheet, a founding editor of Cordite Poetry and Poetics Review, co-editor of Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, and poetry editor of Meanjin from 2000 to 2005. His work appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and a wide range of other Australian and international electronic and print publications.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712465
ISBN-10:  184471246X
ISBN-13:  9781844712465
Author:  Peter Minter
Title:  blue grass
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-06
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  blue grass is the fifth book of poetry by award winning poet, Peter Minter.

Fierce in its attitude to life, visionary in its philosophical curiosity and fluent in its study of traditional and contemporary poetics from around the world, blue grass heralds the renewal of an engaged lyrical voice in Australian and international poetry.

Opening with a Homeric challenge to the contemporary imagination (to go ‘eastward into another land/the bluegrass plain’ and ‘find/what there is to say/of transformation, the sparkle, junk/& greenest hearts’) blue grass embarks on an epic journey through extraordinarily everyday personal, natural and cultural landscapes.

The book is arranged across four parts, History of the Present, Auto Heaven, Australiana and Fresh Kills, and is interwoven by the Yonder Sonnets, an innovative series of meditations on journey and habitation. Minter draws on a range of modern European and American explorations in thought and form and remixes them with invigorating studies of traditions in voice and image.

The poems are readable and alert. They offer intimate and careful observations of places and people that are disarmingly precise in their detail. They reflect on politics, war and environmental devastation alongside avowals of being and relating. They sample images and riffs from popular culture, literature, music, news, art and film, throwing daily life into relief against a resilient, organically shared history.

Above all, the poems are affirmations of existence. They know that a deep appreciation of life’s fragility must be founded in positive acknowledgements of worldly things and relations, or more simply, in acts of love.

blue grass is the work of a mature and daring imagination. Few poets accomplish such a deft and original balance between street-smart enquiry, closely felt meditation, technical virtuosity and poetic experimentation. Peter Minter’s achievement is the invention of a radically contemporary lyricism — confirming his reputation as one of the most relevant and groundbreaking poets writing in Australia today.

Podcasts
All recordings © Peter Minter peterminter.com

Play Garden Estates (1.8 MB)


Play Glimpse (920 KB)


Play Jou (944 KB)


Play Never Return to a Meadow Permit (1.6 MB)


Play Quiet Hunt (888 KB)


Play Realisable Desire (968 KB)


Play Voyager (1.2 MB)

Table of contents:
Voyager
HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
Garden Estates
Jou
Never Return To A Meadow Permit
Glimpse
On the Moida of Roni Levi by Constable Rodney Podesta and Senior Constable Anthony Dilorenzo, the ‘Awesome Twosome’, at Bondi Beach early on the morning of Sunday, 28th June, 1997
Realisable Desire
Super Georgic
Quiet Hunt
Knitcap Sutras
Elope
The Sign as Nature Struck at the Capital’s Heart
Cove Lament
Life™
Emperor Go, Godspeed
is it is
Elenge
Cleaning Flakes from Grass
AUTO HEAVEN
Target Rich Environment
Assent
War in the Filigree of Peace
Enterprise
Political Economy & Raphael’s ‘Madonna of the Pinks’
Vision
Wallpaper Codicil
I just do eyes, j-j-just eyes
Intellectual Perverts
Re-entry
Crazy
AUSTRALIANA
i. Odelic
ii. Elementaries
iii.
iv. A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey. (A.D. Hope)
v. The Destruction of the Past
vi. Turf Guide
vii. Orphic Heads
viii. i.m. Dorothy Hewett
ix. Leftocracy Cosmetics
x. The Rivulets
xi. The Spectre of Exchange
xii. Funkelnagelneu
xiii. Dog Cremation Lyrebird
xiv.
FRESH KILLS
Valentinea
Amor
Besides Good & Evil
Fishing with the Bonnie
Elative Elegy
Bermuda
Seasonalogue
Merciless
Order Fulfilment
Black Star
Serine
Extinction
Au Revoir
106
Zukofsky’s Other List
Notes to the Poems

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (456 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Never Return To A Meadow Permit

You began as it ends to begin, holy world
calling up a wind as you walk out

& stand before the crest
to speak of love, living in the shape of people,
breath’s slow fall

with no memory of form, like
all that is made of grass, stone, sleep in trees

grows taller and taller with extinction.
Tonight’s town
drinks up an army of ghosts,

screens tinkle as new ice
explodes gracefully overhead, blue deals transmitted
to fields of occupation.

You are there in a dream
opening on the hour, the light fall of leaves
commodity’s source

in each word, line, leaf
as it passes daily from our lives.

I am permitted to never return
to a meadow, the one they show again on cable
eyes breezy with rites

of chaos, that permission,
now propertied & lost, is gone.

Review quote:  What is remarkable is the economy of means through which Minter manages conclusive, unillusioned, poetic and visionary possibility.

Times Literary Supplement

Review quote:  Genuinely exhilarating, assured and truly seductive, with a control of mood and precision of vocabulary and lineation that are truly winning. Peter Minter's poems unlock the fission of language.

Australian Book Review

Review quote:  A virtuoso.

The Age