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Strategies for Confronting Fear: New and Selected Poems
by Anthony Lawrence
Anthony Lawrence characteristically sets his poems within powerful landscapes and seascapes. There is a dramatic confrontation in them, between the elemental forces of nature, and those within the consciousness of his characters.
His focus on relationships, the rhythms of work, and the presence of danger in these primal settings, gives to his moral questioning a primal quality in turn. In an interview with John Kinsella (in Thylacine), he describes his poetry thus: I'd like to think that a couple of my poems achieve this tricky balance: landscape veined with humanity, flora, fauna, what's imagined and what's experienced... I write about nature to define my life.
Anthony Lawrence is one of Australia's most highly regarded poets, and winner of two of the country's most prestigious poetry prizes, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. This volume is a selection of work from six of his poetry collections published in Australia, plus a body of new work. Strategies for Confronting Fear is Lawrence's first volume of poetry to be published in the UK.
His instincts are as true as his conscience is fierce. These evocative poems turn a breath of sea air, a shred of kelp, the brush of flesh, into a whole sensual novel
Lawrence's work is accessible while still retaining the integrity of a unique poetic vision.
Lawrence beats form into life, combines delicate lyrics with tales of grace and desperation, and mixes blood with the spirit
Lawrence's poems are skilfully made artefacts and intensely experiential... [His] characteristic attraction to intensity pays off in a newly austere lyricism.
Lawrence has crept up on the audience for Australian poetry. He is now one of the most assured and challenging of our poets. This volume [The Sleep of a Learning Man] is a testament to craft skills at the service of a relentless self-questioning.
Paperback
138 pages
ISBN 1 900072 49 1
Published January 2006
