Javant Biarujia

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Biographical note:  Javant Biarujia is the author of two award-winning plays, several books of poetry and numerous literary essays. Winner of the inaugural Robert Duncan Poetry Prize, in 1998, his work is widely represented in journals and anthologies in Australia and the United States. He was writer-in-residence at the University of Indonesia, just after the fall of Soeharto. Low/Life, an exploration of Orientalism, was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year prize, in 2003.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713066
ISBN:  9781844713066
Author:  Javant Biarujia
Title:  Pointcounterpoint
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-07
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Biarujia brings together for the first time long-awaited sections from out-of-print titles along with excerpts from his two recent books of poetry and new, uncollected poems in pointcounterpoint: new and selected poems 1983–2008. Widely hailed by poets and critics alike, Biarujia is one of “the most structurally challenging and innovative poets” writing today, according to American poet and critic Ethan Paquin. In “Part One: Early Books”, the reader will find poems from 1983 to 1991, starting with a long paean to love based on Xenophon’s famous shout, Thalassa Thalassa, which Oxford historian and tutor Tim Rood described in his book The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination as “[t]he most sustained use of Xenophon’s shout as a romantic symbol in modern poetry”, and ending with an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS. “Part Two: Later Books” ranges from the highly experimental verse of Calques (2002) to the “voluptuous (of words as much as of sensations; perhaps even moreso) …, from [the] deliciously lyrical to bitterly epigrammatic” (Michael Helsem) poems of Low/Life (2003), which was short-listed for the Book of the Year prize in Australia in its year of publication. “Part Three” contains new and uncollected poems, including the winning poem of the inaugural Robert Duncan Poetry Prize, judged by Robert Kelly. Together, with the previous two Parts, they weave a fabric of points and counterpoints into the rich text(ure)s of Biarujia’s pointcounterpoint.

Table of contents:
PART ONE: EARLY BOOKS
From Thalassa Thalassa (1983)
“Book Four”
Eye in the Anus (1985)
Four Love Figures
“A man often recoils before the truth of himself” (Cocteau)
Cotillion Cocteau
The Coctelian Hour
From Autumn Silks (1988)
From Ra (1991)
PART TWO: LATER BOOKS
From Calques (2002)
Calcutta
VLNCLL
Toxophilites Blow in the Air
The Tragedians DDT
Rama
Nisi Prius Shem About the Prima Facie
Avatar
Elagabalus
Let Om Bodhi Land
Ahimsa
From Low/Life (2003)
Louveciennes
Self-Portrait on Light
Ghost of Desire
Next to Nothing Without You
Limousin
Cartolina Illustrata
Singosari
Gunung Bromo
Borobudur
Island of Blood Island of Marrow
Low/Life
À un Javanais
From Anagoge of Fire (2004)
Kavafis sativa
MapleTROPE
HomO’Hara
Protasi–Apodosi pasoliniano
Crève-Crevel
Foucault the Diddly-oh!
“Que Sera Serrano”
PART THREE: NEW & UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Amir
Helmi
Hamid
Art of Dissuasion (III)
Commando Tidbits Make Me Amorous (Catullus)
Aphrodite
[Dé]lire
The German Consulate in Melbourne
The Bactrian Boys
Kain und Abel
[recto]
The Moloch Heap of History
Icoglan
The Warholy Grail
“active/passive” — from Obje(c)t Fou(nd)
“lingam/phallus” — from Obje(c)t Fou(nd)
Work in Progress (“Virilities”)
Endymion
Cupid
Tvashtri
Vahram
Minotaur
Hades
Being, Its Own Reward

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Excerpt from book:  

Ghost of Desire

The courage of your touch, disobedient to the cult of youth:
your fingers, in prescient musculatures, alter all the capodastros
of pleasure. The strings are fraught with the score, the imaginary.

Of lips which brush
on the glass of persico you bring me.

          Although I would never admit it, I feel the glass of love
          tremble in your hands.

With lips slightly parted, relinquished from the constraints

of first physiognomy, first youth, music

from that first night, no longer resonating so brightly, I bear you
toward a banal age, its accusing lines —
tongue, palms, longing.

We recognise ‘‘handsome and strong’’ from the past,
its nervus on time spent:
sinews’ impulses of younger days,
fate, pleasure, ghosts.

Extrema linea amare: you must return before the day begins. I close
your eyes against the imperfection of sunrise.

Previous review quote:  [Biarujia] has trusted language, in its quirks and gleans and quibbles and quiddities, to make a steady and moving reading … Along the way he has developed a comparable if ironically sensuous sort of musical recitative that tells of the tragedy any image is.

Robert Kelly

Previous review quote:  Javant Biarujia, most thoughtful, provocative and accomplished of poets.

Geraldine Mackenzie
Jacket

Previous review quote:  The poems in Low/Life range in tone from voluptuous (of words as much as of sensations; perhaps even moreso) to nostalgic, from deliciously lyrical to bitterly epigrammatic. They wear their learning & their languages lightly, & a sly, whimsical humorousness is never far. Ashbery, St.-John Perse, & Cavafy together might have collaborated on some of these, but who else could have come up with: ‘Remember who calls out the defunct enchantments of the day does so in the total absence of art but with a pure illumination of the infinite’ …? Surrealist writing has seldom achieved such Idumaean music.

Michael Helsem
Boxkite

Previous review quote:  The most sustained use of Xenophon’s shout as a romantic symbol in modern poetry is to be found in an intense and intriguing work Thalassa Thalassa by the Australian poet Javant Biarujia.

Tim Rood
The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination

Previous review quote:  Javant Biarujia [is one of] the most structurally challenging and innovative poets in Calyx, [who] deal[s] in organic rather than lyric form, recalling Zukofsky’s proclivity for ‘sight, sound, and intellection’.… Biarujia is as comfortable within the confines of the prose poem or dictionary entry as he is with verse.

Ethan Paquin
Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets

Previous review quote:  No more a poet of the Americas than Bunting or MacDiarmid, Javant Biarujia, an Australian poet, has embarked on the most systematically and literally idiolectical poetry of which I am aware.

Charles Bernstein
My Way: Speeches and Poems

Previous review quote:  Wide-ranging in its forms and the emotions they make manifest, Javant Biarujia’s Low/Life moves through discontent to elegy in an attempt to make terms with the harbingers of fate and the marauders of history. A quixotically alluring performance.

Charles Bernstein

Previous review quote:  Louis Armand, Javant Biarujia, Geraldine McKenzie — almost seem to ignore [the use of ‘I’ in their poetry].… Among the more stringent pleasures are the deliberately ‘experimental’ texts of an Armand, a Biarujia, a Lilley, or a Minter.

Doug Barbour
Jacket

Previous review quote:  [Calques] is a compelling, stimulating, intricately wrought, sometimes hauntingly beautiful and often very funny book, written in styles at once globalised and hermetic, archaic and futuristic.

Chris Edwards
Australian Book Review

Previous review quote:  Reading Calques sweeps readers off their feet into uncharted addictions, arousals, raptures. I’m crazy about it, no question, and deeply admire Biarujia’s skill, the effervescence of the text, its depths.

Sheila E. Murphy