Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day. It shows how much can change in a day — the whole world, and at the same time nothing at all. The stage version of Solstice was commissioned by the South Australian Theatre Company in conjunction with Magpie Theatre and was first performed in B...

With its currents wearing its sandstone away, Sydney seems like one of the elements, sinking with the tides, pulled by the stars. It moves to the long pulse of the universe as its rhythms drift in and out of phase. It waxes, it wanes; it is lost and rebuilt every year.Equinox tells a story of Sydney over four seasons. The days lengthen and fortune shines, until the earth swings from the sun and into a long winter. The city-dwellers all draw the same curve with their lives:...

Fortinbrasse is the tragedy of Hamlet’s mirror and foil, the Prince of Norway. It builds on the handful of references Shakespeare gives us in Hamlet with further details from his sources together with my own speculation about the circumstances that eventually lead to Fortinbrasse’s bittersweet arrival at Elsinore at the end of Hamlet. The action is roughly contemporaneous with Hamlet’s, beginning a short time before news of King Hamlet’s death reache...

Death of the Author is a serial killer thriller with a literary twist. In the 1990s, the genre of serial killer fiction is emerging into a serious literary occupation. The world's pulpiest authors converge on a sleepy southern city once described by Salman Rushdie as "the ideal setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film" for the inaugural Festival of Multiple Homicide Fiction--only to be killed, in gruesome homage to their most famous works, by a shadowy fig...

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day.It follows five characters as their paths cross, tangle and separate: two lovers, two strangers, and a wanderer within the city. From the hills to the beaches, from the city towers to the botanic gardens after dark, it seeks out the poetry of everyday li...

After the chaos of pain, the love desire, its expectations, its exaltations or disappointments. A love story of two women that will change their lives and give an unsuspected strength to each of them.

Through the fads and fashions of the last thirty years Brian Patten has remained true to his own personal vision of poetry. Whether composing lamentations to the terrible beauty of human love, or writing his outstanding popular verse for children, he has continued to articulate and illuminate the joys and sorrows of the everyday world.His reputation has been enhanced progressively by each of his collections, and now with translations into numerous languages including Italian, Spani...

Combining poems of historical depth, human fascination, and personal sensitivity with a willingness to explore the possibilities of poetic form and technique, this compilation produces diverse formal arrangements from Arabic, English, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Welsh poetry. As it aims to assimilate aspects of these traditions with the poet's own voice, this collection pays homage to the lives and works of Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, and Edward Thomas. Intimate a...

Wry and insightful, this short story is told by a young American girl, who is all too knowing about her own world, but ignorant about the Kiwi strangers she meets. When Ruthie's father needs a drink, he takes his young daughter with him. She sits in the bar, with her pink panther, watching the drinkers and fending off unwanted approaches. One day there are strangers at the bar, with an unusual accent, saying they are from 'Nyu Zillun'. They give Ruthie a 'little green mons...

Death affects and comes to us all. It is silly and futile to ignore it. To find peace we must embrace it as a part of our journey while on this plane of existence. Death, whether of a person, animal, plan, way of life or thing, is the portal for birth or re-birth.

This book summarizes the rise and fall of depression through its stages. It tracks my recurring mental illness through the struggles in the dark to brightening in a world where the mental illness millstone is momentarily lifted.

Philip Larkin's second collection, The Less Deceived was published by The Marvell Press in 1955, and now appears for the first time in Faber covers.The eye can hardly pick them outFrom the cold shade they shelter in,Till wind distresses tail and mane;Then one crops grass, and moves about- The other seeming to look on -And stands anonymous again.from 'At Grass'