Gone: Satirical poems: New & Selected brings together a diverse range of metrical constructions
including villanelles, sonnets, raunchy ballads and whimsical ballades. There
is an invigorating, sardonic edge to Oliver’s poetic, driven by an often
oblique and dark humour. The ballad, for instance, is a demotic form, but it
takes a particular skill (one Oliver owns to a high degree) to write with the
kind of verve that enlivens rhythms both comic and colloquial. Here we have
tales of murder, drunkenness and debauchery. We live in the Age of the Anthropocene. Oliver deftly
lampoons a world consumed by its own narcissistic concerns.
Stephen
Oliver—Australasian poet and
author (right) of 17 volumes of poetry. Travelled extensively. Signed on with the radio
ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting
in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. Free-lanced as production voice, narrator, newsreader,
radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. Lived in Australia
for 20 years. Currently living in NZ. His long narrative poem, Intercolonial, published by Puriri
Press, Auckland, NZ (2013). A transtasman
epic.
He has published widely in international literary journals. Regular
contributor of creative non-fiction and poems to Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian and New Zealand
Literature. Poems translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. His
poem cycle Deadly Pollen, Word Riot
Press, USA, 2003, was recently translated in its entirety (Polen Mortal) by the Chilean poet, Sergio Badilla Castillo and
first published in Nagari (Vol 7
2015). Represented in: Writing To The Wire Anthology, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, University of
Western Australia Publishing, 2016.
Gone:
Satirical Poems: New & Selected: https://stephenoliverweb.wordpress.com/
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