Westering

Product Description

Shortlisted for the 2008 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. Winner of the William Baylebridge Prize

Westering is a dazzling collection. It displays a range of allusiveness, wisdom and technical skill amounting to virtuosity that calls for the right use of superlatives. Kirkpatrick endlessly surprises with profound observations enlivened with urbane and playful wit. The book is like the pleasure of intelligent conversation with a splendid host. The longer poems showcase an expansive and intricate mind; the shorter lyrics make a striking concert that will echo.

Westering is a much-awaited work from a fine poet who has been long appreciated by lovers of sophistication, clarity and wit. It’s not a book to put away on the shelf: it belongs in the room where most of the living is done. — Michael Sharkey

Peter Kirkpatrick manages with ease that most difficult triad of craft, accessibility and intelligent argument. These are poems that both delight and provoke, the laconic satire slipping under the wire of our complacencies. — Judy Johnson

Peter Kirkpatrick is a Senior Lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. He has published articles and poetry extensively in Australian literary journals. His first volume of poetry, Wish You Were Here was published by Five Islands Press in 1996. His poem “Westering” was runner up in the 2002 Broadway Poetry Prize, and he was the winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2004 for his poem “Bucolic Plague”.

REVIEWS

“Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply literate poems.” GREGORY KRATZMANN, Australian Book Review (paywalled)