London Journal/London Poem

London Journal / London Poem is an account of the author’s thinking & seeing while on a trip to London to visit son & daughter-in-law & to travel with them & his own partner, to Berlin & Barcelona. It is an amusing calibration of self-consciousness, speculation, stereotypes & detail, reflection and discovery. Thoughtful-and yet forgetful, easily distracted, hardly there sometimes-Ken Bolton’s is a lyrical figure limned against the harsh outlines, the stark colours, of the Adelaide art world, adding a word here, a thought there, in the general flux of words and deeds around town, and something of a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1957 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide where he runs the Dark Horsey bookshop & edits Little Esther books.