Product Description
With Signal Flare, Anthony Lawrence continues and extends the lyrical work that began with The Sleep of a Learning Man and which found sustained resonance in Bark.
Six years in the making, Signal Flare showcases many of Lawrence’s hallmark stylistic flourishes: arresting inner music, dramatic clarity, and imagery that is often ‘cinematically tactile’ (the Poetry Archive). These poems highlight a number of abiding themes and concerns: human relationships; connections between the natural world and human involvement or intervention; clear, surreal evocations of place and character, and unusual, often indelible, depictions of weather and landscape.
Signal Flare is Lawrence’s fourteenth collection of poems and contains his finest work to date.
REVIEWS
“Lawrence’s poems almost always have an exciting shape to them, beginning at an angle that makes us think ahead to the way in which the poem will play out its shape, something that is rarely predictable and which holds quite a few surprises…This visual intensity is only part of the compound intensities that make up Lawrence’s poetry, but it ensures that the poems like these fix themselves limpet-like in any reader’s mind.” MARTIN DUWELL, Australian Poetry Review
“riddled with wonder and amazement, yet it is also underpinned by an ability to obverse meticulously, and to go about its image-making as ‘primarily a discipline of rightness’…Many poems in Signal Flare are meditations on nature, metaphysics, love, loss and mortality. These are Anthony’s prevailing themes, yet there is a more pronounced elegiac tone in this book, There are many poems of tenderness and compassion, and they sing with a generous voice.” JUDITH BEVERIDGE, Rochford Street Review
“Most notable in the richest poems in Signal Flare is an assured yet flexible control of poetic language, syntax, and thought that creates a line of ideas, images, and experiences that yield complex understanding, insight, and responses…Signal Flare is one of the most illuminating and moving books of poetry to be written by an Australian in recent times.” JACINTA LE PLASTRIER, Australian Book Review (paywalled)
