STEPHEN OLIVER

‘Our leading transtasman poet.’ Dr Nicholas Reid (Canberra)

Gone: Satirical poems: New & Selected (illustrated by the award winning Matt Ottley) brings together a diverse range of metrical constructions including villanelles, sonnets, raunchy ballads and whimsical ballades. There is an invigorating, sardonic edge to Oliver’s poetic, driven by an often oblique and dark humour. The ballad, for instance, is a demotic form, but it takes a particular skill (one Oliver owns to a high degree) to write with the kind of verve that enlivens rhythms both comic and colloquial. Here we have tales of murder, drunkenness and debauchery. We live in the Age of the Anthropocene. Oliver deftly lampoons a world consumed by its own narcissistic concerns.

‘Composed over the course of the last few decades, and displaying an enormous range in voice and form, these poems find focus in the struggle between art and amusement, both with respect to the writer who creates and the audience that consumes. Consequently, while always entertaining, the poems also often possess a subtle power to disturb and provoke, an effect that in the best examples leave you almost feeling guilty for having so much fun while reading them.’ Jefferson Gaskin—Antipodes

Stephen Oliver—Australasian poet and author of 17 titles of poetry. Travelled extensively and worked on the ‘Voice of Peace’ radio ship, Israel, at the close of the 70s. Free-lanced as voice artist, producer, news reader, columnist, copywriter, narrator, etc. Lived in Australia for 20 years. Now NZ. Published widely in international literary journals. Regular contributor of creative non-fiction and poems to Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature. Poems translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. Represented in:  Writing To The Wire Anthology, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016.

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