Friendly Street New Poets 10

New Poets Ten continues the tradition of Friendly Street launching new and emerging poets into the stratosphere of the Australian poetry community. On the Friendly Street launch pad three poets, Libby Angel, Rob Bloomfield and Rob Walker, prepare for lift off. Bleak intimacies share cabin space with formalism, surrealism, Augustan stature, sprawling parody and sharp observations of the natural world. But this is also a passenger flight, so buy your tickets and climb aboard. The view will astound you as the words of these three poets fall to earth like fresh rain.

Stephen Lawrence states: This is vivid writing, often employing powerful and extraordinary imagery.

Libby Angel asserts a poetic freedom, often wild yet under firm control. The poems in Stealing are at times bleak, sassy, confronting and personal, but true to their artistic intentions.

Robert J. Bloomfield’s Deaf Elegies spans loose, wide-open verse and most rigorous forms and yet it is a coherent collection. It wears its learning and life experience on its sleeve but it is not dry or didactic. Rather, it is commonly sharp and witty and synergises with the everyday.

In Sparrow in an Airport Rob Walker endeavours to be a ‘global’ poet, yet resides in the provincial - but is not parochial or unsophisticated. This talented poet’s themes are contemporary and socially engaged, yet the best poems make their point more powerfully for taking a gentler approach.