Publisher's Synopsis
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.
