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Biographical note: Philip Neilsen is an acclaimed poet, fiction writer and editor. He has published five collections of poetry, five novellas or novels for young adults or children, a book of literary criticism on David Malouf, and edited two major collections of Australian satirical poetry. He is the founding head of creative writing and cultural studies at the Queensland University of Technology.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844712861
ISBN: 9781844712861
Author: Philip Neilsen
Title: Without an Alibi
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BB
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Feb-08
Extent: 128pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight: 192 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 12.99
Price: USD 23.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: Philip Neilsen’s poetry is intelligent and sophisticated, but accessible to a wide range of readers. His passion for the environment and targeting of political and personal folly are driving forces, and his poetic range is impressively varied — from the evocatively lyrical to satirical narratives — from intense seriousness to sharp comic wit — all with a rich imagination aimed at personal and social issues.
Main description: This book is divided into two sections: the first is titled “Forest” and deals with environmental issues through a wide range of approaches and forms, including lyrical celebration, satirical and comic attacks upon folly, and explores both contemporary and historical subjects. The second section is titled “Metamorphosis” and deals with relationships, politics and myths. Neilsen is interested in everything – the science of botany, the subterfuges within marriage, the beauty of birds, the evolution of clock-making, bears who attack American campers, New Age exploitation of the vulnerable, workplace bullying, World War Two, the German love of Roy Orbison, Blues music, academic politics, creative writing classes, mortality, and the ancient magic of the forest. He explores or reinvents historical and literary figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Shakespeare, Joseph Banks, George Bush, Robinson Crusoe, Kenneth Graham and Lewis Carrol, Christian saints who battled the pagans, Brunhild and Sigurd, Jim Corbett and his tigers, Harry Potter in restless middle age.
Neilsen uses a wide range of poetic styles, from the formal to free verse, providing the reader with a variety of voices and perspectives – but all his poetry is driven by intelligence, seriousness, curiosity, inventiveness, a comic imagination, passion and wit. He finds no easy answers, celebrating both nature and science, reason and fantasy, but always wary of hypocrisy, humbug and hubris. No wonder his work has been praised by poets as varied as Les Murray and John Kinsella.
Table of contents:
Part I – The Forest
Narrative of a Leaf
Literary Forests
1. The Last of the Mohicans
2. The Children of the New Forest
3. Robinson Crusoe
4. The Wind in the Willows
The Black Forest
The Conservative Forest
The Fairy-Tale Forest
The Imperial Forest
St Martin and St Boniface Destroy the Forest Gods
Sigurd is Instructed by the Birds
Brunhild Becomes a Nature Goddess
Brisbane, 1959-1960 27
Clouds
Crusoe Revisited
Death will be Unsighted
Statues
Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat
Gangway
In Praise of Bears
Jim Corbett Has the Idea for a National Park
Koreelah Ranges, Northern NSW
Ecological Love Poem
May Gibbs in the New Suburbs
Plantation – Glasshouse Mountains
Anatomy of a Forest
Public Liability
Recording the Birds
Salt
The Art of Memory
The Lost Valley
The Man Who Couldn’t See Colours
The Need for Seclusion
Fontainbleau Forest
Queensland Bedtime Story
Tree-planting
Under the Cover of Shared Pleasures
Wilderness
Carbon Dioxide
Bush Lullaby 2
Part II – Metamorphosis
The Anteater
Walking with Shoulder Bags
Suburban Dinner (1)
The Investigation (2)
Taking Off from Cyprus
Tavistock Square July 7, 2005
Metamorphosis
First Creative Writing Class
Do We Have to Read the Set Books?
Six Curses
After I Died
Poetry at Hanging Rock
The Lie of Biology
The Romance of the Clockmakers
Workplace Bullying
Biggles Flies Again at 95
Harry Potter and the Enchanted Wood
Blaming Your Childhood
Roy Orbison in Germany
Academic Party
In Search of Shakespeare
Practising Blues Piano Scales
Lewis Carroll’s Counsellor
George Bush in Brisbane
Pets View excerpt as PDF:
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Excerpt from book:
Ecological Love Poem
for Mhairead
This poem arrives at the function unsure if it is
under-dressed. It glances around the room hoping
to see someone it knows. Relieved, it recognises
the romantic image of the tree, the archetype of fruit.
The lyric and woman and tree are old friends.
We both prefer a sceptical heart. Alarmed by the fuzzy
retreat into the personal that swells poets’ tongues.
Others deploy terror-management theory, incense
or neediness. But in the space between tough hope
and another year, I write the endless charm of your face.
Here is rational love, tree song, this tunnel of light
through the late bush, as we fall to silence.
The parrot flash and purple sky are almost invisible,
and we know about trust – look, that glistening creek
ahead is really a weakened trunk infested with beetles.
I can no longer disappoint her, now she and the poem
are the same. No pygmy Wordworths scurry through
this undergrowth, scribbling in lavender notebooks;
no tiny Tennyson conjures maidens in sultry paperbark.
We make our own ecology in a youthful century.
The poem and the forest have emotional intelligence.
Shoeless she walks through them, words crackle underfoot.
‘Being in the world’ will bring us home, my love,
after we have made pilgrimage to each other,
to the eucalypts which burn, and hoist their colours.
Review quote: Philip Neilsen is a master of transformations … his work may portend a return, or continuation of the Australian sense of poetry as an art for people beyond one’s own narrow cohort. Les A Murray Review quote: Philip Neilsen [is] an important Australian writer … as a fantasist he is capable of a literary distancing [similar to] Borges … a powerful talent. Southerly Review quote: Philip Neilsen is a writer of national reputation, whose name will soar outside Australia over the coming years. When he writes a poem, he does something quite unique: he manages to balance the “machine” of the line, the use of figurative language, and unusually for many poets, knowledge. John Kinsella Review quote: Neilsen’s poems appeal particularly; they’re adventurous [and] have great emotional strength. Sydney Morning Herald |
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