Author(s): BOLTON KEN

Poetry

In Sly Mongoose the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an 'ordinary punter', a beaver, a worried mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John Forbes. So there you go. 'Nobody in Australia is writing quite like Ken Bolton ... working a relativist's sceptical, provisional territory ... (a) thinking against thought'.- J.S. Harry' A rare instance of contemporary Australian poetry in the mode of literary and cultural criticism'.- David McCooey