Blister Pack

Synopsis

The calendar discreetly

points out that our

days are numbered.

David McCooey is an elegist of the everyday. His poems combine minimalism and intensity, elegance and emotion. Finely crafted and edged with wit, they offer a kind of unsentimental nostalgia, a passionate irony. Blister Pack is a first collection of immense control and variety which has the haunting resonance of music.

Praise for this Book

‘David McCooey’s Blister Pack is poetry of a beguiling lyrical clarity. It is immensely pleasurable to read. But underneath its silky rhythms there is a disconcerting and compelling unease.’ —Dorothy Porter

‘How many kinds of weather play over the soul? This is the question David McCooey’s poems ask, steadied by an elegant equanimity. Coping with yet another diurnal tremor, he can wryly reflect that “This is what the suburbs/ Were created for.” These poems acknowledge how everyday experience has discernible limits and, at the same time, that something dark lurks beyond those limits. Civilization is like that.’ —Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Reviews of this Book

‘On of the most immediate pleasures of McCooey’s poetry is its formal elegance, its air of composed sensuousness. ‘Beguiling’ is how Dorothy Porter describes its ‘silky rythms’.’ —Jennifer Strauss, Australian Book Review

‘Throughout this collection, there is pleasure in seeing a lucidly articulate intelligence at work. It is a readerly pleasure compounded, not negated, by the poet’s recognition of the limits of experience.’ —Jennifer Strauss, Australian Book Review