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 AwardsThe 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.

Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New & Selected

Literature & Fiction

Tranter, John

History & Criticism

University of Queensland Press

Raised by Wolves

Cook, Robert

Duncan, Jenepher

Art Gallery of Western Australia

''Urban Myths:210 poems'' collects the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia. A generous selection of new work is also included. 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.

Urban Myths: 210 Poems

ReadHowYouWant

John Tranter is a leading international modern poet based in Australia. "Urban Myths" is the distillation of forty years' work and twenty published books, and in over three hundred pages of poems it gives a wide-ranging sampling of his writing: historically aware yet very contemporary, technically gifted yet easy to read.

Poetry

Salt Pub

This is a fresh collection of energetic and engaging writing. These poems focus sharply on the contemporary world, from the political to the religious, from the public arena to the deeply personal, from "The aggression of foreign companies ...the survival of the most / bastardly is built into the system" to "Parents were templates, / but I could not plot the father...The tractor did its work like any rusty mechanism / and his office was the open air, a church of absence." As well as twenty-five new poems, Heart Print also brings into print over fifty pages of strong, early writing not previously published outside Australia. From the US Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002: "Tranter may now be Australia's most important poet. Since the late '60s, Tranter's cosmopolitan, oddball verse, inspired by John Ashbery and others, has offered a post-modern, hip, slippery challenge to the better-known rural poetics of Les Murray. During the 1990s, Tranter emerged as an international figure, first by editing well-received anthologies, then with the Internet journal Jacket. [...] The untitled set of 28 sonnets and delightful prose poem that conclude [Heart Print] present light-fingered commentary on subjects from "Starlight" to absinthe and middle age: "I re-live youth asleep," one affecting line admits, "and leave it behind at dawn." Readers [...] will see why Tranter has mattered to Australians for so long." John Tranter is an important writer in mid-career. He has published twenty books, including Gasoline Kisses (Equipage, Cambridge, 1997) Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh 1998), Different Hands, a collection of seven computer-assisted prose pieces (Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998), The Floor of Heaven, a sequence of four interlinked narrative poems (Arc, 2001), and four anthologies of other writers' work including (with Philip Mead) the 474-page Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. He is the publisher and editor of the widely-read Internet literary magazine Jacket.

Heart Print

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