Böcker utgivna av Puncher and Wattmann

This very lively collection contains a wide sweep of poems, many of them prize-winning, taking readers on a remarkable journey. Some look to the past, others to the future, but all are of their time: the reverberating now. The tone is contemporary and bold, while the poet's sensibility tends to favour an eclectic inclusiveness. Uniformly, this wide-ranging and poetically engaging collection demands to be enjoyed."As striking and triumphant in current poetry as a Gauguin in a gallery of Flemish still life." - Robert Harris, generally on Jenkins' work, in Overland."There's a whole-heartedness about how he embraces the world he sees: aware of its faults, but never stinting..." - Sharon Olinka (USA) Thylazine website."The wit, language play and urbane imagery we are used to from Jenkins, as well as emotional repth and an infectious delight in language..." - Mike Ladd, reviewing Dark River in Australian Book Review."Innovative, intellectually sprightly, and artistically refreshing." - Heather Cam, reviewing A Break in the Weather in Sydney Morning Herald.John Jenkins is the author of nine collections; he also writes non-fiction, short stories, radio plays and sometimes for live performance. Born in Melbourne in 1949, John lived in Sydney in the 1970s, and has worked extensively as a journalist, both at home and overseas and now writes full time. John won the 2003 Arts Rush/Shoalhaven Poetry Prize; the 2004 James Joyce Suspended Sentence Award; and 2013 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize. He has presented master classes in Dublin and Singapore. John lives near Victoria's Yarra Valley, on the semi-rural fringes of Melbourne. He enjoys walking, good wine and hopes for a better world.

Bruce Dawe has received wide recognition as Australia's most popular poet, his books often being set for study at secondary and tertiary levels. Slo-Mo Tsunami offers a typically wide range of poems covering personal, social, political, and religious issues. Some critical opinions: 'It is because no single Dawe poem strains to grasp the totality of life that Dawe can summon a kaleidoscope of public and private feelings with poems that continually delight and surprise. He is an eligible popular poet because he is accessible in both language and attitude.' - Nicholas Birns, Australian Book Review 'Like William Blake, he demonstrates the ability 'To see a world in a grain of sand'. Dawe bestows on the minutiae of life a mythic significance, both gently mocking and affectionately admiring.' - Margaret Saltau, The Age 'Much of his poetry is in the public domain; his concerns shared by many working men and women... He is modern without being avant garde, contemporary without being radical. In this respect he could be likened to W.H. Auden.' - Kilian McNamara, Wizard Study Guide 'More than any other poet in Australia, Bruce Dawe has assimilated the influences of his generation of poets and combined them in a set of interests and a style that spread across from popular poetry into literature.' - K.L. Goodwin, York Notes

'When I listen to Bach, I seem to turn into a fish'. "Bach (Pau) in Love." 'We forget because we want to live. We forget because we live in hope for a better life. It's this wretched hope that demands that we forget the unforgettable'. "The Last Smile of Graf Tolstoy." These stories explore the nature of love, loss and memory: central to them is the uneasiness the narrators feel about their place in the world. A critical moment in the life of each narrator illuminates these themes in remarkable ways. For instance, in the story "Walter Benjamin's Pipe" the narrator wants to comprehend that critical moment when Walter Benjamin, the famous Jewish-German philosopher and literary critic, decided to end his life. In the story "Bach (Pau) in Love," the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Cassals imagines the situation which would have inspired Bach to compose his six suites for cello. In the story "Anna and Fyodor in Basel," Anna, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's wife waits for that moment whtn Holbein's famous painting about the dead Christ makes its appearance in the novel 'The Idiot'. In "The Quartz Hill," a Cantonese photographer looks at the prints of Paddy Bedford's paintings about the Bedford Downs massacre and decides to visit Halls Creek in search for her Gija grandmother's roots.

Dennis Greene's poetry is meditative, wry and questing, with surprising eruptions of strangeness. It is built deftly and surely, grounded in subtleties and nuances of crafting and structuring; individual poems gather together as a greater tonal architecture. Literary shades such as Yeats, Wilfred Owen and Blake provide points of engagement or departure; as do figures like Magellan, Churchill, Darwin. Shakespeare murmurs ever-present in the wings. With curiosity and insistency Greene finds poems hidden in the light and shade of the everyday - in husband and father-hood, domesticity, the West Australian landscape. With quirky narratives both mythic and quotidian, moving discoveries, messages in bottles, he might be one of the explorers he writes about, returned but taking us via tellings and re-tellings to the edge of the mapped, the known, for shiver-and-goosebump glimpses of 'dragons'. "These poems speak immediately: a calm and thoughtful voice grows through their images and observations. They get into the reader by a stealth that is wonderfully devious, extremely likeable and not by special effects or dramas. They are also expansions of quiet humour, long and deeply engaging echoes of 'being'." - Philip Salom "Dennis Greene asks us to look again at what we already know. This poet's hand, in language tempered by humility, holds time aside, waits for the mystery to come forward from its shadow, and meticulously records its impressions. Greene is a giving poet. He offers us a 'world through unfocused eyes' and shows us how to look again." - Morgan Yasbincek

George Dyügayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the course of a life spanning much of the twentieth century, the spirit of his late father visited him in dreams and gave him the seventeen verses of the The Bulu Line. Full of magic and local history, the poems describe journeys with ancestors and spirit beings, encounters with rainbow serpents and ferocious storms, and explore the vast distances of the West Kimberley landscape. A pioneering experiment in contemporary Australian literature, George Dyügayan's The Bulu Line is the translation of a richly textured oral poetry into printed form. Rather than reduce the songpoetry to short, static lines of verse, Stuart Cooke has assembled a series of startling multi-vocal texts that invite a plethora of never-ending readings. Just like Cooke, you can also become a translator, and contribute to the performance of the poetry. In this way, writes Cooke in the introduction, we "let the force of the Bulu keep rolling."This book showcases the complexity and power of one of the world's oldest and greatest literary traditions, and provides testament to its remarkable capacity for ongoing evolution. "I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this kind of work." - Stephen Muecke (from the Preface)"Stuart Cooke's translation and arrangement of George Dyügayan's The Bulu Line is a work of deep and subtle artistry. It brings a songline to readers as only a poet with strong connections to Aboriginal place and poetics can do." - Deborah Bird Rose

When Peter Porter noted the brilliance of Philip Salom's poems and said they were unlike anything in Australian poetry, he was referring to Sky Poems (1987), an ironic otherworld of the twentieth century and the first book of the Alterworld trilogy. Salom later added The Well Mouth (2005), an underworld of limbo and stopped-life to counter Sky Poems' endless possibilities. Now the accidental realities of Alterworld reach into the twenty-first century but remain haunted by Salom's ambiguous visions of life and death. The poems have satirical verve and sensuality, and are layered in surprising linguistic echoes; his imagination is almost architectural but also acutely social. Alterworld is extraordinary and unique.

Following a long creative practice of the sonnet (La Leçon d'Otilia, 1995), Anonymous of Troy inaugurates a new exploration of doubleness and overlay in terms of place, time and feeling, sustained by an equal doubleness in terms of form and language. The scene is Çanakkale, Turkey, facing Gelibolu on the other shore of the Dardanelles. But Gallipoli is a piece of ANZAC peering through the mirror of Port Jackson. The scene is Abydos facing Sestos, where Hero is still waiting for Leander. But the scene is also Truva, facing the infinite a few miles south, where Johnny Anadolu got the better of Achilles Johnson. The worldwide scene is then, thousands of years ago, as primitive as Parramatta today, the girl of both times will recognise herself in the TV commercial. Isolettric verse, sound play, anagrams, are cadenced to protect modernity against its ageing. "Coste's novel Days in Sydney is a work demanding certain critical acclaim. Bilingual, in direct touch with Australian creative writing, it brings to the latter a contribution of the highest distinction." - Robert Pickering "The poems are very accomplished. One doesn't usually encounter such a range of learning in poems these days and Coste manages to be highly evocative, too, drawing upon classical themes in a modern setting." - Paul Kane

"When we put Kissane's almost telepathic empathy, his political subtlety and his humour together with his wide-ranging technical skills we have an Australian poet who is both a pleasure to read and a likely candidate for the best half-dozen or so of his generation." - Geoff Page, Canberra Times "This is generous poetry. Out to Lunch is a book of sustenance, pleasure and tender anatomies of living. These poems have conscience and gratitude; a sense of the momentous in ordinary things. Feast and savour. Delicacies will stick in your teeth-and you'll want them there." - Meredith Wattison A childlike perspective on life makes Out to Lunch a breath of fresh air in the solemnity of many other poetry collections that explore family dynamics and the elusive self. The poems are beautiful aural/oral creations... lovely to recite, perform and enjoy. - Judges' Comments, Shortlist, NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry

'Zajkowski's writing has that kind of imaginative rightness that tells us something essential about ourselves and reads like something no one has ever said before. Imbued with human vulnerability, mystery, wonder and awe, the poems testify to a largeness of vision about what poetry can be and what a poet can accomplish. If it is possible that sometimes the soul just 'appears' then it has done so in this fine collection.' - MTC Cronin and Peter Boyle Originally from New Zealand, Maria Zajkowski is now based in Melbourne. For the past two decades she has published her poetry in local and international journals. Her work has been funded by Arts Victoria and The Australia Council for the Arts. In 2007 her manuscript 'From an Island' was shortlisted for the Alec Bolton Award. Two suites of poems from 'The Ascendant' won both the 2011 and 2012 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize.

'Heart Starter' is John Tranter's twenty-fourth book of poems. It is made up of three parts: some poems related to 'The Best of the Best American Poetry 2013', some poems related to 'The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of 'Poetry' Magazine', and thirty or so poems, mainly rhymed sonnets, written by Tranter in recent years. In the case of the first two parts, the author started with loose drafts which borrowed the end-words of each line of some poems in each of the two books concerned. The poems engage in a typically oblique way with North American poetic culture, and with the world of poetry in general, and sometimes speak harshly about the nature of 'poetic insight'. The formal poems towards the end of the book take a bleak and sometimes humorous look at the contemporary world.