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:  9781876857714
ISBN-10:  1876857714
ISBN-13:  9781876857714
Author:  John Tranter
Title:  Trio
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Sep-03
Extent:  180pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  270 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 17.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Trio is a 162-page omnibus collection of three books of poetry by leading Australian poet John Tranter published over a period of wide-ranging stylistic experiment in the 1970s.

Red Movie, John Tranter’s second book, published in 1972, reveals a break or shift in his approach to poetry. The first half of the book is made up of a series of moody imagistic landscapes and fragmentary portraits of people reminiscent at times of Robert Lowell, and a memoir of country and urban adolescence. The rhetoric is mainly romantic. The ten-page poem ‘Red Movie’ which concludes the book moves out into new territory. Its style, though lyrical, is mosaic, seeking its effects in the juxtaposition of bright and contradictory fragments. History, literature and personal experience are broken and reassembled into a patterned montage of words, an approach perhaps influenced by the authors’ course-work in linguistics, Gestalt theory and field theory for his academic degree in psychology.

Crying in Early Infancy (1977) is a collection of one hundred fourteen-line poems. Five are carefully rhymed sonnets, some are solemn, but most are loose and playful and some are exuberantly incoherent. Existentialism, Marxist theory, foreign movies, Hollywood, soft drugs, homosexuality, teenage angst, cool jazz: it all goes into the blender of Tranter’s art, and nothing is safe. It was the seventies, after all.

Dazed in the Ladies Lounge (1979).
Among a handful of alternately serious and light-hearted poems three longer works stand out: a study of the influence of Rimbaud, alternately grateful and scolding; a series of imaginary tableaux where five leading European intellectuals are forcibly replanted in an Australian context (Sartre at Surfers Paradise, for example); and Ode to Col Joye, a playful look at the author’s fellow-poets and his own cultural setting.

Table of contents:
Red Movie
The Orange Spot
Hospital
Balance
Bestiary
Ward Five
The Road Back
On the Track of the Attainable
Memoirs of a Forty-Year-Old Revolutionary
Lesson
Julie
At The Piccolo
Country Girl
Sketch for a Portrait of a Young Woman
Conversations
The Raft
Red Movie
Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets
1. The Tidal Wave
2. Non-Euclidean Geometry
3. Your Lucky Double
4. Jet Set
5. Ecstasy
6. Model Behaviour
7. F.O.
8. Chloroform
9. The Lilies of the Field
10. Kandehar-Kabul, 1967
11. Fighting the Secret Service
12. The Famous Chinese Poet
13. At the Laundromat
14. (beginning with a line by David Malouf)
15. Korsakoff’s Syndrome
16. Sex Chemistry
17. Surfers Paradise
18. Pickup Truck
19. The Diamond Sutra
20. Double Images
21. The Function of Dreams
22. Triage
23. The Pleasures
24. Jack’s Tracks
25. (after A. de St. Exupery’s Vol de Nuit)
26. Landscape With Automobile
27. Miss Lonelyhearts
28. Barnstorm
29. Ten Statesmen
30. Starlight
31. (after American Graffiti)
32. The Drunk Thug
33. The Training Manual
34. Art
35. Artefact
36. Timing
37. Sediment
38. The Moated Grange
39. Film Noir
40. The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
41. The Bus
42. Toxophilus
43. The Hollywood Version
44. The Lessons
45. Patagonia
46. Two Figures
47. NW1
48. Fashion Shoot
49. Phase Shift
50. (from a BBC synopsis)
51. Trick Ending
52. The Museum
53. Duty
54. I Know a Man Who Lives in the Dark
55. A Hard Art
56. Jungle View
57. The Doll
58. Oenology
59. Absinthe
60. Telescopic Sight
61. The Spy
62. The Exile
63. Ballistics
64. Position: Poet
65. Weather Report
66. The Wine of the Region
67. (after a phrase by Laurie Duggan)
68. The Painting of the Whole Sky
69. The Student Prince
70. The Decline of Narrative Painting
71. The Chicago Manual of Style
72. The Beaches of the Caribbean
73. Winter Cruises
74. The Soto Zen School (for Duncan Ellis)
75. Debt
76. Half Moon
77. Hunting Moon
78. Pedagogy
79. In the Casino
80. Lusaka
81. Going on Your Nerve
82. Night of the Colonels
83. Choice
84. The Rhetoric of Fiction
85. The Knock on the Door
86. Writing for Television
87. Scuba, the Acronym
88. Thermal Drift
89. The Blues
90. 1968
91. The Chev
92. Egyptian Reggae
93. Tropics
4. On the Right Bank
95. A Drink by the Pool
96. Hobo, Computer
97. Note Found in a Bottle
98. Fever
99. Dictation
100. The Blue Mirror
Dazed in the Ladies Lounge
Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy
The False Atlas
The Wine Bar Women
American Women
The Un-American Women
Nineteen Fifty-eight Women
The Revolutionaries
Butterfly
Leavis at The London Hotel
Sartre at Surfers Paradise
Foucault at The Forest Lodge Hotel
Roland Barthes at the Poets’ Ball
Enzensberger at Exiles Bookshop
Apolitical Poem
Telephone
Radio Traffic 1: Lipstick
Radio Traffic 2: Flak Static
Radio Traffic 3: Foxtrot
Radio Traffic 4: Tricycle
The Wind
The Germ
Moonshine
Lipographia Literaria
The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile
Ode to Col Joye

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Excerpt from book:  

On the Track of the Attainable

The ambitious minister from the smaller nation
outside the borders of history
through a lack of the will to be
makes up for flesh deficiency with another woman.
He has a bitter smell like a sick uncle that nobody wants
having good reason to drink failure.

Another night plunges into darkness
and symbols of alcohol and flame.
He rushes across the city
from one flesh garret to another
gathering evidence of bones under the face
and articulated structures of pain.
He cries that he is ravished with the threat of death.
‘My bones crack and tremble under the dirt!
My teeth mangling the worm!’ Nightmare
made incarnate in every foul breath!

The larger nation affords an expansive smile
and wears golden ambassadors like a blessing
fingering out to Rio, Guadalcanal, Korea
fond in the delusion of money and the teeth of life.