Apocrypha

2010 ACT Judith Wright Poetry Award 2010 QLD Premier's Award for Poetry 2011 ALS Gold Medal shortlist The re-release of Peter Boyle's masterpiece 'Apocrypha' to coincide with the publication of 'Ghostspeaking'. In Apocrypha Peter Boyle retrieves the luminous classical landscape that is the birthplace of Western civilisation and the Western psyche. Setting out to find the discarded or forbidden parts of this landscape his search brings to light a forgotten but distinctly classical undercurrent of animism of a piece in its intellectual lucidity and precision with classical science and philosophy. In the retrieved fragments of William O'Shaunessy's translations the outer world of poplars ibis windmills commerce and political vagary interflows seamlessly with inner worlds of sorrow anguish love and loss to create a sparkling wholeness of meaning and matter that seems utterly lost to the West today. In a way that perhaps only a poet can however Boyle shows that this wholeness can be now as it always was our own. Freya Mathews It's hard to think of a more ambitious book of poetry in this country at least recently. Martin Duwell Peter Boyle lives in Sydney. He has published five books of poetry as well as three books as a translator of French and Spanish poetry. His most recent book Apocrypha won the Queensland Premier's Prize and the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and was shortlisted for the Australian Literary Society's Gold Medal. His translation of Cuban poet José Kozer's Anima was released by Shearsman Press in 2011.