a deeply serious—& flip, & gauche, & witty & almost self-cancelling—consciousness at work. – Lyn McCredden
At the Flash & At the Baci is a super-sized collection of Ken Bolton’s work drawn, for the most part, from the mid 1990s to the present. The poems are remarkable in their ability to take in and hold ‘in conference’ many strands of thought and layerings of experience and to ground them in the immediate and everyday context of the poem’s own making.
These poems were mostly conceived, written and worked on at the establishments which lend the collection its name,
The Flash and
The Baci, two coffee shops in Adelaide’s Hindley Street.
The poems are various and consider, for example, a list of things to be done as the poet drives in to town, a meditation in his lunch-break on the relation of the eye to the brain, on the number of flies being swatted at any one time around the world… Other poems consist of contemplations: on life in Rome today, on Patti Smith and John Coltrane, on friends, work, art & time passing, & on politics — and the simple movement of people in the street. These are poems resolutely of the city and today, of Australia and its precarious position vis a vis the West and Asia and in relation to its own past.
Ken Bolton’s work has been accused, on the one side, of ‘breaking all the rules’ and found, on the other, to be intelligent and amusing:
one of the most distinctive voices in Australian poetry—the first Australian poet to dismantle the conventional Modernist lyric mode without giving up the lyrical impulse – John Forbes,
The AgeAbout the authorFrom Sydney,
Ken Bolton has lived in Adelaide since 1982 and is associated there with the Experimental Art Foundation. He writes poetry and art criticism and is publisher of Little Esther books. His major collections prior to At The Flash are a
Selected Poems from Penguin, and
Untimely Meditations, Wakefield Press.
‘At the Flash & At the Baci’
Ken Bolton
ISBN 1862547386
Wakefield Press
rrp $24.95 NZ$34.95
www.wakefieldpress.com.au
