12 Abandoned Poems, Barry Schwabsky

Edition of 55, hardback, cloth cover, 24 pages
Kilmog Press
ISBN: 978-0-9864616-7-5
RRP: NZ $45.00

In his afterword to these poems, Barry Schwabsky explains: ‘the origins of my desire to work with the “failed” or “abandoned” efforts of other poets undoubtedly lie deep within the history of my work. I have always been fascinated by the obviously self-contradictory notion of a text whose final form would nonetheless be predicated on the suggestion that it could easily have been otherwise.’
12 Abandoned Poems include reconfigured works from K. Silem Mohammad, Geoffrey Young, Amy King, Catherine Wagner, Kevin Killian, Simon Smith, Tim Atkins, Louise Mathias, Robert Richman and Richard Hell.

These poems echo their origins, remaining untitled, and gain new form in the very act of being read, and yet always retaining this feeling, that they are works ‘Grown obscure / among mortals // but plain / to the eyes of passing gods’.

About the author

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet living in London. He has published two full-length collections, Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003) and Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009) as well as several chapbooks, among them For Despair (Mindmade Books, 2005) and Fate/Seen in the Dark (Burning Deck, 1985). He is the art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum.

Available at Parsons Bookshop in Auckland or from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Shop.