Urban Myths

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John Tranter Urban Myths 210 Poems
Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: John Tranter has published twenty collections of verse. He has lived at various times in Melbourne, Singapore, Brisbane and London, and now lives in Sydney, where he is a company director. He is the editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket, at http://jacketmagazine.com/ BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844712526 ISBN-10: 1844712524 ISBN-13: 9781844712526 Author: John Tranter Title: Urban Myths Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Sep-06 Extent: 436pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 25 mm Weight: 654 gms Supplier: Gardners Books Supplier: Ingram Book Group Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 19.99 Price: USD 26.95 Rights: Rest of world Not for sale: AU	See larger image PAPERBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£19.99~~ £15.99 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$26.95~~ $21.56	Short description/annotation: John Tranter is a leading international modern poet based in Australia. Urban Myths is the distillation of forty years’ work and twenty published books, and in over three hundred pages of poems it gives a wide-ranging sampling of his writing: historically aware yet very contemporary, technically gifted yet easy to read. Main description: Urban Myths collects a wide range of John Tranter’s best writing from a forty-year career together with a generous selection of recent poems. His work is noted for its technical virtuosity and masterful handling of traditional forms in a modern context including sonnets, haibun, haiku, odes, elegy, and Sapphics. There are poems like snapshots, a few lines long, and a film noir story that runs for over thirty pages. There are flashes of lyrical beauty and desperate adventures, fear and loathing in America and a quiet drink in a waterfront bar in ancient Alexandria. Many of Tranter’s poems engage with literary exemplars — Callimachus, Shakespeare, Schiller, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Sartre, O’Hara — and hold up their attitudes and procedures to a sharp contemporary scrutiny. Alongside his more approachable narrative, lyric and critical work John Tranter has persistently explored a project of experimentation, interrogating the traffic between speech, writing and meaning, and challenging the preconceptions of the reader. In one example, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is reduced to a dozen pages; in another, a gaggle of literary figures have their work shredded in a computer only to see it reborn in a fresh guise. For all its delight in scholarship and the ironies of history, this writing is focussed on the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of the here and now. Table of contents: From Borrowed Voices 2002 After Hölderlin From Parallax 1970 The Moment of Waking The City, the Tree The Visit Kabul Rescue Whitey The Plane The Non-commercial Traveller Mary Jane Machine Paint From Red Movie and other poems 1972 Balance Bestiary Ward Five On the Track of the Attainable Red Movie From The Blast Area 1974 The Guadalcanal Motel Poem Ending with a Line by Rimbaud Compromise From The Alphabet Murders 1976 The Alphabet Murders 49 From Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets 1977 Starlight The Bus The Chicago Manual of Style Art Artefact The Moated Grange Ballistics I Know a Man Who Lives in the Dark The Doll The Spy Position: Poet The Painting of the Whole Sky The Blues 1968 By the Pool At the Laundromat From Dazed in the Ladies Lounge 1979 Ode to Col Joye The Un-American Women The Revolutionaries Leavis at The London Hotel Sartre at Surfers’ Paradise Foucault at The Forest Lodge Hotel Enzensberger at ‘Exiles’ Bookshop The Wind The Germ The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile From Selected Poems 1982 A Jackeroo in Kensington From Under Berlin 1988 Backyard Country Veranda North Light Widower Debbie & Co. Voodoo Fine Arts The Creature from the Black Lagoon High School Confidential Stratocruiser Laminex Lufthansa On Looking into the American Anthology Shadow Detail Parallel Lines 131 Having Completed My Fortieth Year Boarding School Papyrus After the Dance Haberdashery Poolside At The Newcastle Hotel Affairs of the Heart Lullaby Dirty Weekend La Pulqueria From The Floor of Heaven 1992 Breathless From At The Florida 1993 Journey At The Florida God on a Bicycle Dark Harvest Ariadne on Lesbos Days in the Capital A Marriage Falling Anyone Home? The Romans Storm over Sydney Opus Dei North Woods Con’s Café At Naxos Two Views of Lake Placid Snap Old Europe Box Contaminant A Plume of Ash Chicken Shack Cable Chimp Bells Under Water Aurora From Different Hands 1998 Neuromancing Miss Stein The Howling Twins From Gasoline Kisses 1997 The Duck Abandons Hollywood From Blackout 2000 Blackout From Ultra 2001 Lavender Ink Black Leather Gallery Halogen Locket Miss Proust My Story Off Radar On the Road Package Tour Per Ardua ad Astra South Farm Under the Trees From Borrowed Voices 2002 After Laforgue Brussels Address to the Reader After Rilke Invitation to America On La Cienega Festival Night Harry’s Bar What the Cyclops Said Where the Boys Are Notes from the Late Tang From Studio Moon 2003 Moonshine Sonata The Twilight Guest Paid Meridian The Green Buick Trastevere Radium In Praise of Sandstone Chinese Poem, after Mark Ford Christopher Brennan Epitaphs See Rover Reach Grover Leach Elegy i.m. M.J. The Beach Five Modern Myths Three Poems about Kenneth Koch Black Sugar The New Season’s Patterns Like Advertising Rimbaud in Sydney The Waiting Room Amulet The Seasons—Spring The Seasons—Summer The Seasons—Autumn The Seasons—Winter Uncollected Poems 1985–2000 Small Animal Poem The White Hole Paradox Two Haikus Two Short Poems, after Li Po Two Poems for Mr Stevens What Mortal End Her Shy Banjo Fin de Siècle New Poems: The Malley Variations An American in Paris Benzedrine The Master of the Black Stones Flying High Pussy Willow Smaller Women Transatlantic Under Tuscan Skies Year Dot The Urn of Loneliness New Poems: Europe At the Tomb of Napoleon Bats Care and Feeding of a Small Poem Manikin de Vin On a Noted Vista A Poet in the Reading Room Stage Door Thistles Whisper New Poems: Speech to Text Anguish Bottom of the Harbour Deluge Departure Horticulture Lives Marinara Metro Movements Parade Pronto Royalties Scenes Shames Sorehead Story Subcontinent Nocturne Villas New Poems: At the Movies Shadow of a Doubt North by Northwest Dark Passage Girl in Water Black and White From Selected Poems 1982 The Popular Mysteries Acknowledgments Notes: at johntranter.com View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (72 KB) Excerpt from book: Invitation to America (a version of Baudelaire’s ‘Invitation to the Voyage’) It’s a day for daydreaming: rain choking the gutters, wind whistling at the window. Put down that coffee for a minute and think about it—a ménage à deux at the other end of the planet, floating on a culture with a blank mind, or rather, surfing on the waves of fashion, asleep on the wing, splashed by each passing trend. The way the sun lifts up from the backdrop so enthusiastically and lights up the windblown clouds from behind, it’s a knockout, a patchwork canopy of blue and yellow. The storekeepers, the cops, the culture vultures remind me of you—deliquescent con–artist, blinking and lying through the convenient tears. Like a paint job on a new convertible the talk is brilliant and skin–deep. No history—who needs it? The furniture seems to know what you’re planning, day by day, the air conditioning blesses you with perfume, the mirrors are discreet in what they remember and what they choose to forget. The vernacular of the shopping channel and the sale catalog is on everybody’s lips— nothing but beauty and elegance, and the houseboats and the matching housecoats are just right! Along the canals, the clink of ice–blocks knocking in a jug, the traffic lights are only ever green or amber, and the big orange moon rises on cue, haunt of astronauts. Think about it: a voyage that takes you to yourself; a movie that reminds you of its own locale. Unpublished endorsement : Tranter has produced a body of work remarkable for its intellectual vitality, formal versatility, and powers of renewal over a long and formidable career. Peter Pierce The Melbourne Age Unpublished endorsement : This new and selected poems reminds us, if we needed reminding, just how powerful John Tranter’s cumulated work is. There is a density, an intensity, and a many-sided explorativeness that probably cannot be matched in Australian poetry. Martin Duwell Australian Book Review