Peter Boyle, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions

Shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry

'A dazzling work of the imagination by a mature poet working at the height of his powers, Peter Boyle’s Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is a book that ‘light[s] the darkness at both ends’. Its central sequence of narrative prose poems transports us to a wondrous archipelago of ancestral spirits who ‘sleep outside the folds of their own skin’, grow transparent at different times of day and ‘hold their bodies together’ only by ‘an enormous act of will’. Conveyed upon a ‘river / that carries night under the earth’, our journey is however no mere escapist fantasy to a dreamlike otherworld but brilliantly illuminates the mysteries of this one.  

Imbued with hard-won wisdom and displaying exceptional creativity, Boyle’s poems are as alive to ‘the thought-fibres of language’ as to the condition of silence and ineffability. A testament to poetry’s unique capacity for ‘thread[ing] the line of human story’ as ‘it fractures into wild deviations’, this collection re-imagines selfhood as mutable and relational rather than fixed and singular—as always already incorporating one’s forebears and companions, human and nonhuman. An elegant book of poetic transformations, it is also one in which ‘very slowly you transform into yourself’. 

2025 PM's Literary Awards Judges' comments

Luminous and profound, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is the eleventh collection of poetry from one of Australia’s most respected and celebrated contemporary poets and translators. Over five sections, Boyle offers a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to be human, moving from the personal to the social and political, from the immediacy of the writer’s home to a traveller on a train to Shanghai or a French pianist performing Ravel, as seen on YouTube. This mingling of inner and outer realms continues in dream narratives that sit alongside political poems, such as ‘Our World’, and final haiku-like poems that return us to the vision of our small place in a world filled with other-than-human presences. This is a work of deep imagination and subtle humour, a generous sharing in the sometimes magical, sometimes uncertain and unsettling experience of being human.

'Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions, a new and substantial manuscript from celebrated poet Peter Boyle, shows once again his remarkable facility with language and imagery. This collection in five parts entrances the reader through a poetics of imagination expressed in stories and images that speak wisely. Steeped in a quality of openness to the numinous, not only does the collection as a whole generate its own mythic, symbolic world, but it also builds on Boyle’s vast knowledge of poetic and sacred texts. Through dreamscapes and attention to the corporeal, the poems engage deftly and hauntingly with eros and thanatos. A deepening wisdom and engagement with the world as more than human characterize this collection. No one writes quite like Peter Boyle.' 

Anne Elvey

Peter Boyle is a poet and translator of poetry living and working on Dharug land. He has ten books of poetry published and eight books as a translator of poetry from Spanish and French. His most recent collections are Ideas of Travel and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings (2022 and 2021). In 2020 his book Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness won the New South Wales Premier's Award for Poetry. His book Ghostspeaking also received the New South Wales Premier's Award in 2017. Other prize-winning books include Apocrypha (2009), The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997) and Coming Home from the World (1993). He has performed his poetry at International Poetry Festivals in Colombia, France, Venezuela, Macedonia, Canada, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Spain. His poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Macedonian, Vietnamese, Korean and Russian. As a translator his books include Anima by Cuban poet José Kozer, The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo and Three Poets: Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio and Jorge Palma. In 2013 he was awarded the New South Wales Premier's Award for Literary Translation. He holds a Doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney.

Peter Boyle, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions
2024. 148mm x 210mm. 128pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-64-2

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.