John Tranter

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Biographical note:  John Tranter is a leading Australian poet. He has been employed mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, making reading tours to more than forty venues in the USA, England and Europe. He has lived in London and Singapore, and now lives in Sydney.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857325
ISBN-10:  1876857323
ISBN-13:  9781876857325
Author:  John Tranter
Title:  Heart Print
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-01
Extent:  116pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  174 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 7.95
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  Rest of world
Not for sale:  AU

Main description:  A fresh collection of energetic and engaging writing. These poems focus sharply on the contemporary world, from the political to the religious, from the public arena to the deeply personal, from “The aggression of foreign companies … the survival of the most / bastardly is built into the system” to “Parents were templates, / but I could not plot the father … The tractor did its work like any rusty mechanism / and his office was the open air, a church of absence.” As well as twenty-five new poems, Heart Print also brings into print over fifty pages of strong, early writing not previously published outside Australia.

From the US Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002: “Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet. Since the late ’60s, Tranter’s cosmopolitan, oddball verse, inspired by John Ashbery and others, has offered a post-modern, hip, slippery challenge to the better-known rural poetics of Les Murray. During the 1990s, Tranter emerged as an international figure, first by editing well-received anthologies, then with the Internet journal Jacket. […] The untitled set of 28 sonnets and delightful prose poem that conclude [Heart Print] present light-fingered commentary on subjects from “Starlight” to absinthe and middle age: “I re-live youth asleep,“ one affecting line admits, “and leave it behind at dawn.” Readers […] will see why Tranter has mattered to Australians for so long.”

John Tranter is an important writer in mid-career. He has published twenty books, including Gasoline Kisses (Equipage, Cambridge, 1997) Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh 1998), Different Hands, a collection of seven computer-assisted prose pieces (Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998), The Floor of Heaven, a sequence of four interlinked narrative poems (Arc, 2001), and four anthologies of other writers’ work including (with Philip Mead) the 474-page Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry.

He is the publisher and editor of the widely-read Internet literary magazine Jacket, at http://jacketmagazine.com/

Table of contents:
Lavender ink
Black Leather
Coffee
Country Matters
Gallery
Globe
Halogen
Limbo
Locket
Lookup Table
Men’s Talk
Miss Proust
My Story
Off radar
On the Road
Package Tour
Per Ardua ad Astra
Pyramid
Serial Numbers
Sfumato
Songlines
South Farm
Under the Trees
Vista
Whitecaps
The Alphabet Murders
Starlight
after American Graffiti
The Bus
The Chicago ‘Manual of Style’
Pickup Truck
Barnstorm
Landscape with Automobile
The Training Manual
Art
Artefact
The Moated Grange
The Lessons
A Hard Art
Ballistics
The Museum
I Know a Man Who Lives in the Dark
The Doll
Telescopic Sight
The Spy
Passport
The Painting of the Whole Sky
Absinthe
The Soto Zen School
The Rhetoric of Fiction
The Blues
1968
By the Pool
At the Laundromat
The Beach
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Songlines

The rendezvous – did I miss it? I hear a lonesome
whistle – after the gust of miscalculation
steered back on track, leaves publish
quaint borsalino eloquence as today
becomes tomorrow – some paralysis, some

gesture of reproach: ‘fuck you!’
the real point of which lies in the gap,
the translation from dim intent to
‘that’s obvious!’ to retrospective explanation –
reverse subjunctive – ‘he would have meant …’

then the story of mankind, the babbled
speech in the kitchen – one more whisper,
one less problem to deal with out back,
on the plain of arbitration that stretches
into the haze, distant, endlessly rocking,

tiny adjustments, until the parcel of hesitation
is wrapped up, the way a board meeting
winds down, go home, lights out, lock up,
yet the reason is not explained by the minutes
a troubled secretary attempts to transform into

a final justification for the nature of evil
growing out of an absence of positive good,
that is, it’s your fault – who else? for
growing up into something damaged,
not at all what the relatives expected.

What did they insist on at the school assembly?
How the little bracket fits to the left, how
you must be silent at the back of the class.
The song lines – hear them moaning
behind the wind from the sea as it groans

over the beach and up into the dry hills –
the four-dimensional arrays of speech extend from
the bandstand to the knot of quarrelling drunks
in the dark and their chorus of grief blotted out.
The dog didn’t bark, to give him a nature,

and thus explained everything, but only
to the smart guy. Now the moon
with slow sad steps ascends its tower
while a pale nothing is spoken above
the silent clearing: a few couples look up,

remembering a misspent childhood, and
an awful noise begins, a clattering
that clambers up over the horizon –
we’ve left the sobbing secretary behind –
loaded with a kind of message, a porridge

of popular music and bad news announcements
and always the weather at three-minute
intervals – and now I remember what the city
looked like, back then – glorious – meet me
at the station, honey, don’t be late.

Review quote:  Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet. Since the late ’60s, Tranter's cosmopolitan, oddball verse, inspired by John Ashbery and others, has offered a postmodern, hip, slippery challenge to the better-known rural poetics of Les Murray.

Publishers Weekly

Review quote:  ‘Laugh at death’: throughout Heart Print, the poet tries to remind himself that ‘it’s time for fun,’ time to ‘get a drink,’ and enjoy the summer day in Sydney or elsewhere. But death looms large in this, Tranter’s fourteenth collection of poems, in which camped-up verse forms like the sestina, sonnet, and ballad, or generative devices like the subsequent letters of the alphabet that control the poems in ‘The Alphabet Murders,’ cannot quite contain the disorder of living.

Marjorie Perloff