Product Description
Time Taken encompasses a selection of work from Les Wicks’ 14 previous books. For 50 years he has performed widely in Australia & internationally. Published/broadcast in over 400 different channels, magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 35 countries in 15 languages. Stylistically, the poet sits between camps. Seen as both a “stage” and “page” poet, his work is a mix of accessibility and dense use of language.
This book contains links to live performance, multilingual work plus music/AV collaborations. As a poet with a firm focus on content this collection eschews the traditional chronological structure in favour of a theme-based exposition.
Belief is a major contribution to Australian poetry, and an important commentary on contemporary being. …strong and brave, gentle, angry and broken. It tells the truth.
—Judith Nangala Crispin
…assembles an amazing cast of people in recognisable often dark places. With fine detail, their domestic & working lives are brilliantly portrayed.
—Anthony Lawrence
self-aware, debonair, generous, weary, even despondent, yet never despairing.
—Dominique Hecq
varied, nimble, humane, wry & well timed
—Jennifer Maiden
…because his eye is withering and direct, Wicks gives his subjects a dignity and specificity that many a contemporary Australian novelist would envy.
—Adam Aitken.
REVIEWS
“Time Taken, the New and Selected Poems of Les Wicks, marks a poetic golden anniversary and samples from some fourteen previous volumes…sometimes so whip-smart that he risks but mostly avoids trailing into the smart-arsery of a less empathic writer…This volume is both an accomplishment and an entertainment and, like all good provocations, prompts you to examine your own views.” PAUL SCULLY, TEXT
“His beautiful new book Time Taken: New & Selected is a compendium of that life, full of treasures – wisdom, observations and raw evocations of the man himself. He has so much to share, and to teach us, and his doggedness in peeling back the layers to the human core speaks to his own love of the raw and human detail, almost sacred in an often insane world…Time Taken tells a story of a poet’s life, and the life around him. Wicks observes. He captures. He laments. He quietly, brutally, sometimes abashedly, boldly, sketches life.” SARAH TIFFEN, Compulsive Reader
MARTIN LANGFORD Launch Speech, Rochford Street Review
Comprising of selected works drawn from 42 years of publication, along with a slew of new works, Time Taken provides not just an overview of the decades of Australian Les Wicks’ poetic career, but a document of Australia’s that have passed with the decades and the denizens that inhabited these lost shores. Les Wicks’ earlier poems in particular have a straightforward clarity, where the success of the poem lies in Wicks’ observing eye: Sometimes caustic, sometimes humorous, always connected, human and compassionate. MICAH HORTON-HALLETT , Live Encounters
