Peter Boyle, Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings.
Shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award 2022
Against the backdrop of a world in crisis these poems speak of grief and beauty, of spirituality and resilience. Poems responding to nature, ekphrastic poems and meditations on the randomness of fate sit alongside more personal poems of loss, while in the title sequence dream narratives are interspersed with often short, highly visual poems in an extended questioning of what it means to live and write in the face of mortality.
"We all write our own dreambook – endings, beginnings, what is on-the-way. Boyle urges us to do so with enthralled attention, with care for our lives, our deaths and what is in the middle, our daily – indeed blink-of-an-eye – transformations. Notes, by their modest nature, are made to be left, found, carried:
and, in my shirt pocket, memory places
the note to collect from the Dry Cleaners the trousers
And though ‘(o)ur hands [might often be] filled with loss and jagged / explosions of strangeness’, I would recommend that with full advantage of the note’s ease of transport you take Boyle’s words, tucked this time within the pocket of your heart, into the soul-searching that is our enduring and ‘eternal miracle’." MTC Cronin
Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, which won the 2020 Kenneth Slessor Prize, Ghostspeaking which won the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize and was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Award for Poetry. 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, Vietnamese and Chinese. As a translator of poetry from Spanish and French he has had six 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 due out in April 2018 from University of Alabama Press. In 2013 Peter received the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Literary Translation. Peter has recently completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University, focussing on the relationship between the tradition of heteronymous poetry and poetry translation.
Peter Boyle, Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings.
2020. 148mm x 210mm. 144pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-20-8