| Biographical
note: Tom Shapcott (born 1935) is a well known Australian poet who has been published in a number of countries. Translations of major selections of his work have been published in Hungary, Romania and the Republic of Macedonia. He has published fifteen collections of poems in Australia, as well as six novels and other prose works. He was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide 1997–2005, in South Australia.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844712786
ISBN-10: 1844712788
ISBN-13: 9781844712786
Author: Tom Shapcott
Title: The City of Empty Rooms
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Nov-06
Extent: 140pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight: 162 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 10.99
Price: USD 16.95
Rights: World
|
Short
description/annotation: Award-winning Australian poet Tom Shapcott's latest collection shows him writing at the top of his form, about family, ancestry and origins and about contemporary concerns and social issues.
Main description: This is the most recent collection of poems by Tom Shaocott, prize winning Australian writer; this is a poet at the height of his creativity and ranges from poems about family, ancestry, beginnings, to poems about social issues, particularly the world-wide phenomenon of refugees and the stressed world we live in.
Table of contents:
Totems
Part I
Language
Cape Lilacs for Elizabeth
Returning to Looe
At Byron Bay
Adelaide Stone
Reclaim
Looking for Ancestors in Limerick
Physalis
Rain in the Courtyard
Stories
Part II
The Ballad of Razor Wire
Creative Writing Class
Three Grotesques
The Unwanted
Seven Refugee Poems
New Year's Eve
Aubade
The City of Empty Rooms
Part III
Mozart, Mahler, Those Russians
Roy Agnew
Keyboard Music
Eugene Goossens
Part IV
London 1972
The Pebble Beach at St Stefan, Montenegro
Budva, Square of the Poets
Chekhov in Montenegro
Wine at Lake Ohrid
Bushfire Land Outside Skopje, Macedonia
The Last Winter
Part VBeginnings and Endings
Beginnings I
Beginnings II
Beginnings III
Endings
Backyard Boys I
Backyard Boys II
Eggplant
Preserving I
Preserving II
Beginnings and Endings I
Beginnings and Endings II
Animals I
Animals II
Endings II
Twist of the Dice
Fingernails
Old Soldier
Chocos
Aubergine
Melanzane
Brinjal
Endings III
Part VI
Bagatelles for the Twins
Old Children
Hometown
The Questions I
The Questions II
The Questions III
A Last One for Bruce
Surf and Sand
The Bruce
Giraween
Introduction to the Body
Lady of the Birds
Three Score Years and Ten
Excerpt from book:
Wine at Lake Ohrid
Across the lake last night the thunder rumbled
Testing the water like a drummer's fingernails
And feeling the echo vibrate right up to the hills —
What was the old message? The god who must have humbled
The likes of us with any amount of storm has ambled
Off to the wine fields where this morning he distills
Like a poet himself the earth and the grape and the spoils
Of patience to concoct a wine that now waits to be sampled.
Spirits of wine and agriculture need one further
Component to make the god feel satisfied —
Our tongue, our taste and the singular unalloyed
Capacity for thirst that is mark of man. What other
Creature did the gods have in mind when wine was planned?
We feel like gods ourselves, with a glass of wine in the hand.
Unpublished endorsement : Tom Shapcott has a rare talent for renewing himself. Surprising, humorous, passionately engaged, endlessly acute and curious, about the body, the world, family, place, this is a late book that sometimes sharply, sometimes forgivingly looks back, but always with the freshness of things felt and seen anew in a living present. David Malouf |
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