Böcker av Simon West

Does it make sense to invoke the Muses today? Few of us believe our poems will be better for praying to stola-clad women sitting on a mountain in Greece. This book asks the reader to consider the Muse as something more - a vehicle for acknowledging cultural legacies that radiate out from the past and into contemporary Australia. In addressing the Muses we talk to that inheritance.In these essays Simon West examines our metaphors for reaching back after inspiration. Rather than cultural rubble ripe for plunder, he celebrates our waterways in imagining that heritage, rivers that nourish the red gums across floodplains. In doing so he ranges widely, bridging Classical and European interests with a celebration of Australian poets, while asking, always, where is Parnassus now?Simon West is the author of four collections of poetry and an edition of the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. He is represented in anthologies including Thirty Australian Poets (UQP), Young Poets: An Australian Anthology (John Leonard Press), and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann). His third book The Ladder was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and his most recent, Carol and Ahoy, was published in 2018.

The backdrop of Carol and Ahoy is the Goulburn River and its floodplains around Shepparton. Ancestry and watchful reflection combine seamlessly in these poems, which are always in search of "what is tactile and particular", be it a gum tree, an agave or the past. Simon West's fluid, ever-shifting gaze will be familiar to readers of his previous volumes.Waking on a Summer MorningI asked if verse were no more than a toy, then heard the blackbirds carol and ahoy and the traffic's tidal snare drum sough. They were absolute, these tones, not thought's forgotten setting now, as they washed through open windows and the new-found arch of door jambs, and echoed round the room's old school of shadows. They were glory of music on the mind's cool parquet floor. Simon West is the author of three collections of poetry and an edition of the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. He is represented in anthologies including Thirty Australian Poets, Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, and Contemporary Australian Poetry.