Product Description
Paul Cliff’s sixth collection, consolidates and extends the range of his previous work, with diverse themes touching on popular culture, the political versus private worlds, rural and urban locations; artistic, literary and historical figures; the craft of writing and editing; rites of passage (illness, ageing, death); animals, and travel. And on the sometimes surprising interconnection of these. Poems assume an array of forms including dramatic monologues, lyrics, elegies, sonnets, haiku, epigrams, ekphrastic pieces and prose poems — all underpinned by the observant eye, verbal inventiveness, infectious sense of play, swinging rhythms and striking imagery which critics have noted in his earlier collections.
REVIEWS
“Paul Cliff moved to Canberra in 1997. The Impatient World, published in 2002, was his first full-length collection. A Constellation of Abnormalities is, in effect, his second though he has six books altogether counting chapbooks. On Constellation’s back cover the late Noel Rowe describes Cliff as ‘Murrayesque in (his) capacity for correspondences’. Certainly, like Les Murray, Cliff has a high degree of individuality (some might say quirkiness), an egalitarian brand of compassion and a considerable wit but his end product is very different to Murray’s.” GEOFF PAGE, Sydney Review of Books
