Glen Phillips

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Biographical note:  Glen Phillips was born in the remote goldmining town of Southern Cross, Western Australia in 1936. He gained a Bachelor of Education with first class honours from the University of WA and subsequently completed a Masters Degree in English and Education and a PhD in Creative Writing. Formerly an Associate Dean of various tertiary institutions, he has not only spent his professional life in various tertiary institutions, educating others to write and to teach but established many new degree and higher degree courses in Writing and Australian Literary Studies. Currently he is Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Director of the International Centre for Landscape and Language at Edith Cowan University, Perth. Reciting his own works, Glen Phillips is well known around the poetry readings, literary events and festivals of Perth and beyond. He has performed his poetry in England, Ohio and many European countries, particularly in Italy. He has also read poetry (often at Australian Studies conferences) in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Singapore. In China he has been invited to read his work in Guangzhou, Xian, Beijing, Tienjin, Weihai, Ningbo, Hohhot and Shanghai. From 2004 -2009 he has been Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. Numbers of his poems (some in translation) first appeared in British, Italian, American, Chinese, Singaporean and Korean anthologies and journals, including Westerly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Salt, Poetry Australia, The Bulletin, Tampa Review and Florence News. He has been broadcast on Australian national radio’s Poetica and in the educational TV series Landscape & You. His PhD (completed in 2006) was based on fiction and poetry set amidst the landscapes of Australia, China and Italy. Some works from this project appeared in Quadrant, Salt, Prosopisia, Marginata and other serials. Glen Phillips began getting work published while a secondary school student and as a university undergraduate. His upbringing in small towns in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia provided the landscape settings of his poetry but after visiting Italy to learn the Italian language in mid-career he became fascinated by parallels between learning a second language and ‘learning a second landscape’. After many periods living and studying in Italy he added many works of poetry and prose to the Australian settings of earlier writings. His most recent poetry collection Shanghai Suite and other Chinese Poems is one of the first literary fruits of his 24-year association with China’s culture and landscapes. He acknowledges fellow WA poets John Kinsella and Andrew Taylor as influences.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715282
ISBN:  9781844715282
Author:  Glen Phillips
Title:  The Moon Belongs to No One
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Sep-09
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 28.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  In these ‘New and Selected Poems’ Glen Phillips has three basic themes—scenes from Shanghai life in today’s China, ancient granite landscapes of Western Australia and travelling in Australia and Italy.

All these poems were part of a major presentation by the author, which won him a PhD in 2006: “Land Whisperings and a Poetics of Newplace and Birthplace”. As one examiner put it, ‘ I feel that, as much more a reader than a writer of poetry myself, I can offer nothing but unqualified praise. Almost at random I could pluck out “Holding Stone in Your Hand” as an example of a poem that, in the very simplest of language, manages to unsettle the world and all who inhabit that world.’

Here there are poems to appeal to a multitude of readers—strange ‘honey men’ on the streets of Shanghai, mysteries of the Aboriginal ‘gnamma holes’ in the desert; John Cage’s abstract music or the weird salt lake sculptures of Antony Gormley near Kalgoorlie are unexpected and challenging topics; a stormy day on Dartmoor or summer torrents in the Lombardy Alps contrast with tropical deluges in Kakadu, or a foggy night in downtown China. Traditional classic forms exist side by side with free verse and the lyrical poems co-exist with unusual stories.
Poetry of landscape and love abound in Phillips’ book and confirms the truth of the title’s teasing claim—imagination is unbounded.

Table of contents:
From Shanghai Suite and Other Sinologies
1.Melon Sellers
2.On the Banks of the Haungpu
3.Long March
4.Waking at Night in Jungong Lu
5.Getting Out on the Wrong Floor
6.The Honey Men
7.The Pig Men
8.Two Poems for a Friend
9.Nie Hai Hua
10.The Woman River
11.Suddenly the Sun
12.The Exiled Scholar Thinks of Writing a Sonnet
13.Waiting at the Peace Hotel
14.The Moon Belongs to No-one
15.The Courtesan
16.Awakening
17.Caged Birds
From Granites Matter
18.Rock Picnics
19.Granitic Vertebrae
20.Regarding the Southern Ocean
21.Fire on Wet Granite
22.The Tin Mines
23.Scrub Cities
24.Holding Stone in Your Hand
25.Visiting Gnammas on the Bullfinch Road
From Fire, Ash and Palimpsest
26.Lighting a Pretty Decent Fire
27.from Fourteen Stations to Southern Cross: Nos 8 and 14
28.Wadjemup: an Irregular Sonnet Sequence
29.Four Sonnets for Richard Waldendorp
30.John Cage Goes Outback
31.Lake Visitants
32.A Last Birthday in Australia
33.We Weep to See
34.February
35.Kimberley Quartets
36.Night of the Falling Stars
37.The Bequest
38.Beach Prints
39.Three Settinas: Summer Torrents; On the Pieta of Michelangelo; Wild Strawberries
40.Queen of the Desert

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Unpublished endorsement:  … no doubt in my mind that the poems based on the author’s wheatbelt associations are the most compelling…with their strong sense of locality and taut use of language.

Tom Shapcott

Unpublished endorsement:  Phillips’ best poems are elemental, with thick strokes of colour and solid, touchable objects.

S K Kelen

Unpublished endorsement:  Phillips’ meditative, quietly assertive poems have a balance of joy and shadows, certainty and uncertainty, which points to an alert, contemporary sensibility.

Dennis Haskell

Unpublished endorsement:  Phillips deploys an ironic yet interactive dialogue (in the Bakhtinian sense) in his poetry…using echoes and palimpsests of other writers, and different cultural tropes and responses, he follows his characters through their dialogues of belonging and dislocation.

John Kinsella