John Tranter

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Biographical note:  John Tranter is a leading contemporary poet. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely, lecturing and reading his work in more than fifty venues in Europe, the USA and Australia. He has lived at various times in Melbourne, London, Singapore, Brisbane, Florida and San Francisco, and now lives in Sydney where he is a company director.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857615
ISBN-10:  1876857617
ISBN-13:  9781876857615
Author:  John Tranter
Title:  Studio Moon
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-03
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:  The poems in Studio Moon were written over the last fifteen years, and cover a wide range of styles and approaches: poems that are answers to other poets’ work, sometimes wrenched out of context (a version of Schiller’s ‘A Maiden from Afar’, for example, is set in a hamburger joint in Los Angeles), borrowings from Matthew Arnold and Barbara Guest, an ode, a three-page poem in sapphic stanzas, a computer-based pastiche, two deeply-felt elegies, two sestinas, four haibun, eight pantoums, and dozens of others, all imbued with Tranter’s trademark blend of wit, style and feeling.

John Tranter is an important writer in mid-career. He has published twenty-one books – four collections of work by others totalling over a thousand pages, and seventeen collections of his own writing, including Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh, 1998), Different Hands, a group of seven fiction pieces (Salt Publications, Cambridge, 1998), The Floor of Heaven, a book-length sequence of four interlinked verse narratives (Arc, UK, 2001), Heart Print (Salt Publications, Cambridge, 2001) and Borrowed Voices (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002).

He compiled and edited (with Philip Mead) the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. He is the publisher and editor of the much talked about literary quarterly Jacket, at jacketmagazine.com, which has received more than a third of a million visits from readers around the world.

Table of contents:
After Hölderlin
Five Modern Myths
After Laforgue
Chinese Poem, after Mark Ford
Brussels
Address to the Reader
The Seasons
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
After Rilke
Invitation to America
On La Cienega
Festival
Night
Grover Leach
The Green Buick
God on a Bicycle
At The Florida
Dark Harvest
Ariadne on Lesbos
Days in the Capital
Anyone Home?
The Romans
The Moths
Storm over Sydney
Opus Dei
North Woods
Moonshine Sonata
Elegy, after James Schuyler
Elegy
The Other Side of the Bay
The Twilight Guest
Paid Meridian
Trastevere
See Rover Reach
In Praise of Sandstone
Shelter Bay
Christopher Brennan (1870–1932)
Epitaphs
The Will
Three Poems about Kenneth Koch
Her Shy Banjo
Capital Flow
Black Sugar
The New Season’s Patterns
Like Advertising
Rimbaud in Sydney
This New Town
The Morning After
The Waiting Room
Amulet
Curriculum Vitae
Journey
Falling
Decalcomania
A Man and a Woman
A Marriage
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Storm over Sydney

Blustering over the Harbour, brilliant rain
slaps and blathers at the rusty Bridge.
I dodge for cover as the sky turns green.
Cars wobble and skid on William Street,
      hot with mechanical rage.

Lightning strikes twice: a blinding white
crack! and the echo whacks the concrete.
I fossick and dawdle in the supermarket aisles
safely underground, among the paper plates
      and the jars of honey.

The thunder has trundled a thousand miles
and boiled the Pacific black to bother us all,
and it’s dull and sick from its long journey.
Now I’m trying to wheel a crook trolley
      from the shopping mall:

the chrome’s rusty, and a bent wheel clanks.
It’s the season of ruby cellophane and holly;
the gutters are chock-full of summer hail
fresh-frozen and smashed into chunks.
      At the café I doze

in a corner, read the messages and the mail,
and unwrap the book I’ve bought. It’s old, old:
the writer’s fervour whispering down the years,
epigrams elaborating a narrative – as though
      such fragments could!

On schedule, the weather grumbles and raves
westward over the suburbs. I’m happy. I know
a little park where I can park the car,
sit on a wet bench and watch the waves
      fume in the amethyst air.

Review quote:  … the new poems are exciting, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously powerful, entertaining and revealing. What Studio Moon gives us is a conspectus of one of Australia’s greatest poets in mid-career … As in Tranter’s work generally, there is energy aplenty. Tranter’s essential verbal gift, the core of his technique, is his ability to convey intensity through rhythm and sound …

Martin Duwell
Australian Book Review

Review quote:  Tranter’s poetry, despite its reputation for abstraction, has always turned to people’s lives for its raw material, no matter how freely they are eventually treated. At the same time, it has always had light and dark sides. The celebratory side has usually revolved around popular culture, and this is beautifully expressed in the first poem of this book, ‘After Hölderlin’, a poem that stands as a kind of epigraph to the collection. The speaker celebrates the books and films that rescued him from ‘the factory floor / or the office routine’: ‘These dreams were my teachers / and I learned the language of love / among the light and shadow / in the arms of the gods.’ Of course, this is not a simple celebration, and one can feel the tension between the souces of Hölderlin’s comfort – the gods – and Tranter’s. […]

Martin Duwell
Australian Book Review