2017

Alex Skovron

Leave a Comment / 2017, Author, Year

Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958 aged nearly ten. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. From the early 1970s he worked as an editor for book publishers in Sydney and (after 1980) Melbourne. His poetry has appeared widely in Australia and overseas, and he has received a number of major awards for his work. The most recent of his six collections, Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His collection of short stories The Man who Took to his Bed (2017), and his novella The Poet (2005, joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction), have been published in Czech translations; The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French, was published in 2013, and a Flying Island bilingual volume of Chinese translations, Water Music, in 2017. Some of his poetry has appeared in Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Macedonian and German, and he has collaborated with his Czech translator, Josef Tomáš, on English translations of the twentieth-century Czech poets Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. The numerous public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, Macedonia, Portugal, and on Norfolk Island. An 80-minute CD in which he reads from his work was published in 2019 under the title Towards the Equator. His next poetry collection, Letters from the Periphery, is due in 2021.

Concerns that have driven Alex’s poetry and fiction are many and various: history, language and music; the riddles of time and the allure of memory; philosophy, faith and the quest for self-knowledge; art and the creative impulse; fantasy, eros and the affections. His interest in speculative fiction has played a recurring role in his thinking and his work, as has a lifelong passion for music. As a poet, he enjoys both the disciplines and the aesthetics of formal design and the diverse challenges of freer structures. Integral to his project has been a focus on musicality and the primacy of rhythm. He likes probing the elasticities of syntax, and exploiting the ‘contrapuntal’ layerings available to imagery and meaning via compression, connotation, ambiguity.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Water Music

艾里克斯•史可容：水中曲 (in NLA)
translated by Xu Daozhi = Shui zhong qu / Ailikesi Shikerong ; Xu Daozhi yi

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Anne Walsh

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Anne Walsh is a poet and a story writer whose work falls somewhere on the border of those two countries. She’s been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize twice and for the ACU Prize for literature. Her first book of poems, I Love Like a Drunk Does, was published by Ginninderra Press (2009, Australia). Her second book of poems, Intact, was published in January, 2017 by Flying Island Books. Her poems have been published widely in Australia and abroad. Her work has also been published in the U.S., including a short story, The Rickman Digression (Glimmer Train).

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Intact

In National Library of Australia

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Richard Tipping

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Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, South Australia and studied in humanities at Flinders University. He has lived in the USA (1974/75), and the UK and Europe (1984/86). While lecturing in media arts at the University of Newcastle he completed a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects (2007). Tipping has published eight books of poetry, and is known internationally as an artist working with sign language and typographic concrete. He is strongly represented in the print collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the British Museum, London; and is collected in depth by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Tipping lives between gigs in Newcastle and Maitland, NSW.

Links: www.richardtipping.com

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Instant History

Richard Tipping’s Instant History is a treasure trove of uncollected and new work, in two parts. The Postcard Life brings intense responses to travel in fifteen countries in the 1970s and 1980s. From a meeting with the Empress of Iran, to sailing along the coast of Mexico; from tongue-twists in Tipperary to Vipassana meditation in the Sierras; from ancient sex in Luxor to the visual collisions of Tokyo and quietitudes in Kyoto; from drug-shattered New York to being lost in the Louvre. In the second half of the book, ‘Rush Hour in the Poetry Library’, socially pointed but affectionate poems from Tipping’s adopted home in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales mix with a sardonic politics, humorous social observation, and pictures from a philosophical writing life. Best known as a visual poet and word artist these days, Tipping brings a fresh and energetic voice to the page.

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Andrew Burke

Leave a Comment / 2016, 2017, Author, Year

In 1950, Andrew Burke wrote his first poem – in chalk on a slate board. It was variations on the letter A. In 1958 he wrote a poem modeled on Milton’s sonnet on his blindness. Luckily it is lost. In 1960 he wrote a religious play about the Apostles during the time Jesus was in the tomb. It was applauded. He wrote some poems influenced by T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. They caused a rift in the teachers at the Jesuit school because they were in vers libre: the old priests hated them but the young novices loved them. It was his first controversy. (The only Australian poet in his school anthologies was Dorothea Mackellor!) Around this time, Burke read the latest TIME magazine from USA. It had a lively article about the San Francisco Renaissance, quoting Lawrence Ferlinghetti who wrote: ‘Priests are but the lamb chops of God’. This appealed to Burke who became a weekend beatnik over night.

When he left school, he hitch-hiked a la Kerouac across Australia to Sydney where he worked in factories, on trucks, at a rubbish dump and moving furniture. His poems appeared in these early days in Westerly, Nimrod, Overland and the Bulletin, and he returned to Perth to regain his health and joined a circle around Merv and Dorothy Hewett. A local poet William Grono hit the nail on the head when he described them as ‘I am London Magazine and you are Evergreen Review’. Long story short, Andrew Burke has written plays, short stories, a novel, book reviews and some journalism alongside a million advertisements and TV and radio commercials. He has also taught at various universities and writing centres and gained a PhD from Edith Cowan University in 2006 when he was teaching in the backblocks of China. As a poet he has published fourteen titles, one of the most popular being a bi-lingual Pocket Book published by Flying Islands Press in 2017, THE LINE IS BUSY (translated by Iris Fan). He is retired now but still writing and lending a hand to younger poets. A small selection of poems follow.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Burke_(poet)

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

The Line is Busy

安德魯•博爾克：佔線 trans Iris Fan Xing

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Cui Yuwei 葦歡：刺

Leave a Comment / 2016, 2017, Author, Year

Cui Yuwei, born in 1983, is a bilingual poet and translator based in China. In 2007, she completed an MA in English Literature in Wuhan University. She has published poems in Mascara Review and Cordite Poetry Review (AU). Her works of translation appear in Off-the-Coast (US), The Sons of Camus Writers International Journal (CA) and Ajar (Vietnam). Her Chinese poems are widely seen in various literary journals and collections in China. Currently, she works as an English lecturer in Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai in China.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Fish Bones

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Gail Hennessy

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Gail Hennessy was educated at Our Lady of Mercy College Cronulla and graduated from the University of Sydney with a BA degree in 1959. From 1960 to 1988 she lived and worked in Canberra with her husband and five children. During the 1970s and 1980s her poetry was widely published in regional and national newspapers and literary journals. She was an active member of the Canberra branch of the Society of Women Writers.

In 1988 she moved to Newcastle.  During the 1990s she committed herself to academic work in the field of Australian/Aboriginal studies, graduating in 1999 from the University of Newcastle with a Masters degree by research into the autobiographies of Aboriginal women. This work led to her successful PhD thesis of 2004, ‘Testimonio: Witnessing my Mother’s Life in Twentieth Century Australia’. After completing her thesis Hennessy returned to poetry and has been successful in a number of competitions and anthologies. In 2009 she produced a collection of old and new works under the title Witnessing which derived from her PhD work. (Biography provided by author to the National Library of Australia.)

Hennessey’s Written on Water (Flying Island Books) was published in 2017. The M Word (Girls on Key) was published in 2018 . It is a memoir about postnatal psychosis, and addresses the stigma around mental illness.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Written on Water

In National Library of Australia

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Jonas Zdanys

Leave a Comment / 2017, Author, Year

Jonas Zdanys was born in New Britain, Connecticut, a few months after his parents arrived in the United States from a United Nations camp for Lithuanian refugees. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his M.A. and PhD in English from the State University of New York.

A bilingual poet and translator, he is the author of fifty-three books. Forty-nine of those volumes are collections of his original poetry, written in English or in Lithuanian, and of his translations of Lithuanian poetry and fiction into English. He has received a number of prizes, book awards, writing and travel grants, and public recognitions for his poetry and for his translations. His poem Easter, his translation of Velykos by Judita Vaičiūnaitė, was selected by the Scottish Poetry Library and the BBC to represent Lithuania during the 2012 Olympics in London. Other recent recognitions include an exhibit about his life and work by the National Library of Lithuania, writing and translation grants from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, appointment as Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Connecticut College, selection as Featured Poet at the Scissortail Literary Festival, and appointment as Poet in Residence at Sacred Heart University.

He is also active as an editor and a literary panelist and has served as a reviewer for Wesleyan University Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, the National Endowment for the Arts, and World Literature Today.

He has taught at the State University of New York and at Yale University, where he held a number of administrative positions and was a Scholar-in-Residence in the Yale Center for Russian and East European Studies. As part of his international activities, he was appointed a consultant for the reorganization of higher education by the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and the Lithuanian Parliament. He served for more than a decade as the state of Connecticut’s Chief Academic Officer and is currently Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Sacred Heart University.

Links: jonaszdanys.org
everything.explained.today/Jonas_Zdanys

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Preliudai po lietaus / Preludes after Rain

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Odveig Klyve

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Odveig Klyve (born 29 January 1954) is a Norwegian writer and film director.

Among her notable publications are Rift (poetry debut, 1993), Basunengelen (children’s book, 1997), Historien om Null (children’s book, 2003), Algebraisk (poetry, 2004), Det andre blikket (poetry, 2006), Sterkest – Historien om Tre (children’s book, 2006) and Hemmeleg (children’s book, 2007). In total she has published seven poetry collections and eight children’s books. She has also translated work of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzād, the Palestinian poet Fadwa Touqan and an English poet.

She has written and directed several short films, which have been invited to international festivals in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Romania, US and India. She has her education in literature, film and social studies.

She hails from Hardanger and now lives in Stavanger.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Let’s Take the Blue Sky by Storm

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Patricia Sykes

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Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems and collections have received various nominations and awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, John Shaw Neilson award and the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. Short listings include the Anne Elder, Mary Gilmore, and Judith Wright Awards. She has read her work widely, including on Australian, Paris and New Zealand radio. It has also been the subject of ABC radio programs, Poetica and The Spirit of Things. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. A selection of her poems, Among the Gone of It, was published in an English/Chinese edition by Flying Island Books in 2017. A song cycle composed by Andrew Aronowicz, based on her collection The Abbotsford Mysteries, premiered at The Abbotsford Convent Melbourne — now an arts precint — in 2019.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Among the Gone of It

帕特里夏•賽克斯：流逝 translators Xu Daozhi, Wu Xi 

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