Starlight: 150 poems

An outstanding new collection from one of Australia's most respected poets
With a celebrated fifty-year writing career behind him, John Tranter brings to Starlight the sophistication and ease of that experience, as well as enormous energy and exuberance. After the outstanding success of his latest book, Urban Myths, one of the most awarded books of Australian poetry, these new, vital poems continue to explore poetry's possibilities. Reading the collection is like entering a room abuzz with conversation. Part of the book's project is to displace the authorial ego, and translation, mask and disguise are employed to this end, with Tranter re-imagining work by T.S Eliot, Baudelaire and Ashbery in extraordinary and original ways. Tranter's skills as ventriloquist and his ear for the quirks of expression create brilliantly-realised voices of imagined speakers.
John Tranter applies his lacerating wit to ideas of authorship, egotism and poetry wars in this completely engaging and must-have new book.