Peter Boyle, Ideas of Travel

'Late in his career, Boyle has embarked on one of the most sustained flights of inspiration of any writer currently working. The results are luminous.' Declan Fry, ABC

Ideas of Travel builds in significant ways on Peter Boyle's previous two books, his award-winning Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings. This collection again taps into a deep dreamlike symbolism and directs this to great existential effect. Even staying still we are travelling—across the seasons, across the day, across a life. Written over fourteen months of the pandemic, Ideas of Travel subverts the boundaries between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, ourselves and others. In this sequence of 140 new poems acclaimed poet Peter Boyle examines our sense of what it is to be alive.

'Peter Boyle is one of the best and most fascinating of Australian poets ...' Martin Duwell

Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. He is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings, Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness which won the 2020 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, and Ghostspeaking which won the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize. In 2017 he was also awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Excellence in Literature. Other poetry collections by Peter Boyle include Towns in the Great Desert (2013), Apocrypha (2009) which won the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the Judith Wright (ACT) Award, Museum of Space (2004) and The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997) which won the Adelaide Festival Award and the National Book Council (Banjo) Award. Peter Boyle’s poetry has appeared in journals, poetry magazines, ezines and books in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Macedonia, Germany, Sweden and China. He has presented his poetry at International Festivals in Colombia, Venezuela, France, Canada, Macedonia, Nicaragua and El Salvador. His poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Macedonian, Swedish, Russian, Vietnamese and Chinese. With MTC Cronin he is the author of two collaborative books of poetry: How Does a Man Who is Dead Re-invent His Body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli and Who Was. As a translator of poetry from Spanish and French he has had eight books published. His translations of poetry by José Kozer, Marosa di Giorgio, Olga Orozco, Eugenio Montejo and René Char, among others, have appeared in anthologies, magazines and journals in England, the United States and Australia. Recent books as a translator include Jasmine for Clementina Médici by Marosa di Giorgio and Poems of Olga Orozco, Marosa di Giorgio, Jorge Palma (2017), and Índole/Of Such A Nature by José Kozer. In 2013 Peter received the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literary Translation.

ISBN 978-1-925735-36-9

Release date: March 2022