Peter Boyle, Apocrypha: Texts Collected and Translated by William O’Shaunessy

2010 ACT Judith Wright Poetry Award - Winner
2010 QLD Premier’s Award for Poetry - Winner
2011 ALS Gold Medal shortlist

“In Apocrypha, Peter Boyle retrieves the luminous classical landscape that is the birthplace of Western civilisation and the Western psyche. Setting out to find the discarded or forbidden parts of this landscape, his search brings to light a forgotten but distinctly classical undercurrent of animism, of a piece, in its intellectual lucidity and precision, with classical science and philosophy. In the retrieved fragments of William O’Shaunessy’s “translations”, the outer world of poplars, ibis, windmills, commerce and political vagary interflows seamlessly with inner worlds of sorrow, anguish, love and loss to create a sparkling wholeness of meaning and matter that seems utterly lost to the West today. In a way that perhaps only a poet can, however, Boyle shows that this wholeness can be now, as it always was, our own.” Freya Mathews

“It’s hard to think of a more ambitious book of poetry in this country, at least recently.”  Martin Duwell

Peter Boyle lives in Sydney. He has published five books of poetry as well as three books as a translator of French and Spanish poetry. His most recent book Apocrypha won the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and was shortlisted for the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal. His translation of Cuban poet José Kozer’s Anima was released by Shearsman Press in 2011.

292pp. 2009. ISBN 978-0-9805113-3-8

292pp. 2016 (second edition) ISBN 978-1-922181-89-3