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last update:

23 Feb18

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Film: The Year of the Tree

poetry favourites:
Katherine at Desperado Literature
Arc Publications
Poetry International
British Haiku Society
ARTEMISpoetry

 

shop elsewhere…
collections –
“Acres of Light”,
“Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems”,
“Circus Apprentice”
and “Tigers on the Silk Road”,
Arc Publications;
 
bi-lingual –
“The White Boat“
Integral/CLP
(Bucharest)

 

 

this poet is taking part in the poetry pRO project
this poet is published in the Series project
this poet is taking part in the poetry tREnD project

 

Katherine Gallagher is a widely-published Australian-born poet resident in London since 1979. Winner of the 1981 Warana Prize, her books include most recently, Acres of Light (2016), Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems (2010), Circus Apprentice (2006), and Tigers on the Silk Road (2000) – all from Arc Publications. These books are distributed in Australia by Eleanor Brasch Enterprises.
 
Her other collections are: a translation of Jean-Jacques Celly’s poems, The Sleepwalker with Eyes of Clay (Forest Books, 1994), Finding the Prince (Hearing Eye Pamphlet Series 1993), Fish-rings on Water (Forest Books, 1989), Passengers to the City (Hale & Iremonger, 1985), and The Eye’s Circle (Rigmarole, 1974).
 
Passengers to the City was shortlisted for the 1986 Adelaide Festival John Bray National Poetry Award. In 2005, Vagabond Press published After Kandinsky, a limited edition series of poems on Kandinsky’s Bauhaus paintings in their Rare Objects Chapbook Series.
 
Of Tigers on the Silk Road, Les Murray said: “This book is a beautifully polished brown seed, and there’s a strong big tree inside it.”
 
Other comments:

 

In Tigers on the Silk Road, Katherine Gallagher is writing at top flight. The poems are by turns tender, then bleak, always open to the many emotional and geographical landscapes they cover. Many countries are visited in these poems, and many sensibilities. Love lost, love gained, growth and motherhood, the fragmented identity. It’s a very modern book, the writings of a traveller who investigates geographical, political and moral dislocations of the self and the heart.

 

Jo Shapcott
 

 

…strong, resourceful and varied.

 

Penelope Shuttle on Circus-Apprentice
 

 

Katherine Gallagher is a ‘fervent watcher’ of the world. Like the watcher in her poem “Orchid” (from the sequence La Fleuraison) she is also ‘a global traveller’, and this informs all of her work. Her past, that ‘antipodean patchwork’ is also a rich resource comprising memory and discovery, a place ‘where weather’s a way of life’ … Landscape, war, family, the gains and losses of life, plus aerial meditations during long flights – all shine forth in the wide range of her subject matter, wrought in vivid colours. Gallagher is a poet of the eye, the rainbow and of all the feeling senses.In “Manifesto”, from the final section of new poems wich crown this volume, she says:
 
                     …Bring out your gambler,
                    risk-taker. Surprise yourself.
 
This book attests to the energy and insight of that statement.

 

Penelope Shuttle on Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems
 

 

At its best, this is delicate, straight talking … a poetics that yokes inner generosity to outward reticence … With a turn of phrase, a shoe-tight image, an elegant sleight of foot, everything is transformed …

 

Mario Petrucci on Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems