Well, some of you may have noticed the following announcement on
Beattie's Book Blog yesterday:
New poetry release by Jack Ross, Auckland
A Clearer View of
the Hinterland:
Poems & Sequences 1981-2014
Author:
Jack Ross
ISBN: 978-0-473-29640-7
Price: $30.00
Extent: 192 pages
Format: paperback
Publisher:
HeadworX
Cover image:
Painting by Graham Fletcher
A
Clearer View of the Hinterland
The first of the 33 poems and sequences reprinted here was written in
1981, the latest in 2014 – a time-lapse of thirty-three years. As Paula Green
put it in 99 Ways into NZ Poetry: “Jack Ross writes poetry like an
inquisitive magpie, a scholar, a linguist and a hot-air balloonist … The end
result, in contrast to some experimental work, promotes heart as much as it
does cerebral talk.”
A Clearer View of the Hinterland is Jack Ross’s fifth full-length poetry
collection, and his most substantial to date. It reprints four complete poetry chapbooks, as well as including extracts from numerous others. The poems on offer here include love lyrics,
experimental texts, and translations from a variety of languages.
Critical
comments:
Thought-provoking and challenging, a tantalizing maze,
clashing ideas and images, mixing old and new forms, with wit, candour and
self-mockery. – Harvey McQueen, JAAM
It’s hard to imagine a writer better equipped to give context through
paratext than Ross, for whom form and format are always expressive. – Jen
Crawford, brief
About the Author:
Jack Ross’s publications include four
full-length collections of poetry, three novels, and three volumes of short
fiction. He has also edited numerous books and literary magazines, including –
with Jan Kemp – the trilogy of audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006-8).
If you'd like to know more about the book, I can hardly do better than point you towards Mark Pirie's
HeadworX website, where there are a couple of sample poems, as well as a link to the online
annotations for the collection (it seemed better than loading up the book itself with a lot of fairly specialised source details).
More to the point, you could order a copy right now from Mark Pirie's site (should you wish to). If you'd prefer to wait and have a look through it first, we're planning a launch sometime in late November / early December, together with
Tracey Slaughter's novella
The Longest Drink in Town, which is being published by
Pania Press.
And in the meantime, here's a clearer view of that cover image of
Graham Fletcher's:
cover image: Graham Fletcher / cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross
