Product Description
Kangaroo Unbound is a collection of 50-odd poems that take their titles and inspiration from legendary Australian artist Garry Shead’s iconic ‘D.H. Lawrence’ series of paintings, which he produced in the early 90s in response to Lawrence’s 1923 novel Kangaroo. Like the paintings, the poems range from the heavily influenced (those that lean into the source text with strong ekphrastic fidelity) to those that offer more abstracted and personal renderings. Traversing a range of forms from free verse to concrete, villanelle and sonnet, the poems draw from a host of readily identifiable national motifs in their effort toward a contemporary Australian mythology grounded in ‘Benevolence, Humour and Divine Mystery.’
‘Kangaroo Unbound presents a place-based experiment in poetic ekphrasis. Not simply poems about art, Johnson’s collection traces, transposes and transforms Garry Shead’s D.H. Lawrence painting series into a striking linguistic assemblage. From visual poems that play with the page-as-canvas to more personal lyrics that straddle the poet’s ‘everyday’ in a gentrifying Thirroul, the book finds poetic resonance in the relationships between past and present, poetry and art, and, above all else, creativity and the artistic process.’
—Jake Goetz
‘In Kangaroo Unbound the poems of Luke Johnson veer between satire and threat, suburban comedy and tragedy, tiny details and witty asides gathering with blade force and aftershocks. Just when you think the crooked malice and dark laughs might not find grace, he pays off openly expressed debts to D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas and William Wordsworth to take us further, beautifully, into his Thirroul landscape on the south coast of New South Wales. A dying father, a map of boyhood, love and memory buried behind a seemingly indifferent present – all crying out for a witness like Johnson to reveal the history that lingers.’
—Mark Mordue
