Urban Myths: 210 Poems : New & Selected

John Tranter

Univ. of Queensland Press, 2006 - Literary Criticism - 321 pages

Winner 2006 CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry (Victorian Premier's Literary Awards)

Urban Myths: 210 Poems brings the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia, together with a generous selection of new work. Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranter's poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.

JUDGES REPORT - Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

The new and uncollected poems in John Tranter's Urban Myths make a significant addition to his oeuvre. Control and ease are evident in the writing, which displays personages, occasions and moods of the metropolitan modern world. Tranter's latest poems refresh through the exercise of urbane skills: this is a poet suave and playful, but never aloof; linguistically various, assured in style, and never less than fully attentive.

About the author

John Tranter was born in Cooma in 1943. He attended country schools and took his Bachelor of Arts in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has published eight volumes of poetry and edited the controversial anthology The New Australian Poetry which featured some of the more experimental work of his own generation. During 1987 and 1988 he was in charge of the ABC Radio National arts program Radio Helicon. He lived for some years in Singapore and London and now lives in Sydney.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Urban Myths: 210 Poems : New & Selected
• Author: John Tranter
• Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press, 2006
• ISBN: 0702235571, 9780702235573
• Length: 321 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry; Poetry / Australian & Oceanian; Poetry / General