The full text of the blurbs for Andrew's book:
Andrew Burke has made an indelible mark on
our poetry over the years: his early work was filled with a sort of bravura energy and a willingness to take risks; later, he evolved a warm, compassionate style well suited to the personal pressures that he had to face. Always there has been an underlying delight in language itself - its power and its playfulness.
Here is a poet to hail and to treasure.
Here is a poet to hail and to treasure.
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Thomas Shapcott
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Like William Carlos Williams, West Australian
poet, Andrew Burke, is a master of the quotidian. Like Philip Larkin, he writes
poems to “preserve things I have seen / thought / felt”. Burke is also, however, a poet of memory.
Like the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Burke’s poems tend to be
carefully prepared for “decisive moments”, first from his own life — and then,
by extension, for the lives of his readers.
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Undercover
of Lightness: New and Selected Poems collects forty
rigorous pages from earlier work, preceded by a hundred pages of new work, much
of it set in China and the Kimberley where Burke has recently lived and worked.
Although the poet’s concerns have always ranged widely (as the quotidian tends
to), many of his most poignant poems (such as “Mother Waits for Father Late”
and “Walking to the Meeting”) look back at a somewhat desperate and alcoholic
youth and early adulthood.
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Geoff
Page
A master of the context clash, Burke's is
most fundamentally a poetry of enthusiasm. And it's poetry as enthusiasm. It
does what it wants to do, goes where it must. It's fun to be along for the
ride. And we go everywhere. Tibet, the desert, great rivers, we hobnob with the
ancients. The highs are exalting, the lows are gritty. Burke is the poet who
reminds us that spiders are serial killers. To borrow a few of his words,
Lightness is a freefall fiddlesticks down a hall of mirrors. Hold on to your
hat!
Kit
Kelen
This book is full of illumination, clear
intelligence, music and, most welcome, a sense of humour. Throughout, Andrew
Burke’s poems talk and sing to us, and they talk to other poems and poets, as
if to friends. This is because the poems are peopled, full of living and
speaking. He is not afraid of either direct address, nor of formal experiment
in a way that seems natural, and opens up the poem to both its making in
language and the living it takes part in. In this, all the great themes of love
and mortality are made fresh and real.
Jill
Jones
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