Product Description
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.
REVIEWS
“Usually, in Tranter’s comments about his generative practices, there is a strong sense that the chosen method provides not a poem but a draft that might be made into a poem. You feel that the author here wants to take final responsibility – he must be satisfied that the poem “works” and the original poem for a terminal is thus merely a starting point. But the poems of Heart Starter re-establish the importance of the relationship between the original work – the source – and the terminally-derived new poem.” MARTIN DUWELL, Australian Poetry Review
“But as seen in his latest book, Heart Starter, his interest in such things is not merely nostalgic. Rather, his work is obsessed with remixing the magic pudding of modernity. The past, in other words, is there to be used, not revered or sentimentalised. Tranter’s poetic revisionism treats source texts and forms as transitional objects (to use Winnicott’s term) that offer open-ended play and creativity, rather than demand compliance.” DAVID MCCOOEY, Cordite Poetry Review
“The blend of linguistic abstraction with lyrical imagery is striking…What is also abundantly clear is that Tranter’s inventive energy remains undiminished even into his 70s.” GREGORY DAY, The Australian (paywalled)
