Product Description
This new collection offers three works taken from different periods: ‘At the Onset of Turbulence’ (1989), ‘Frieze’ (2001) and ‘Erasure Traces’ (2006), the last two of which continue the experimental mode of Montale: A Biographical Anthology (Collected Works Volume 1). As in that work, this book invites us into a world of complex connections, both lyrical and humorous, formally innovative and poetically daring.
“Erasure Traces shows us the mercurial invention and observational intensity we expect from John Watson’s poems. But there is also a heady, gleeful abstraction in these beautiful and eccentric fantasias, and the sense of a complex poetic intelligence at work, at turns serious, silly, and astringently experimental. ” — Nick Riemer
“There’s nothing quite like it in Australian literature.” —Thomas Crosse
John Watson was born in the Bland District of NSW and has worked in various jobs, including fruit picking and school teaching. His first book, A First Reader, was published by Five Islands Press in 2003. He was a winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2002 for his sequence 'A Jetty Completely Surrounded.'
REVIEWS
“Watson's most recent collection, Erasure Traces, comprises just three extended landscape sequences written over 20 years, and is concerned with the question of how to transcribe what Watson calls the “incident” by making “an inventory/ of the arbitrary”, as he says in Pastoral.”
SARAH HOLLAND-BATT, The Sydney Morning Herald
