New collection from award-winning poet John Mateer
In a sequence of 64 sonnets, John Mateer
describes the encounters of an alter-ego, João, as he travels across the globe,
attending festivals and readings, meeting with friends, lovers, and often-famous
fellow authors. Questioning identity, melancholy in disposition, troubled
by dreams and memories, João is also an innocent, and given to moments of
illumination and joy.
Mateer is both ironic and affectionate in his treatment
of this picaresque figure, creating through his sonnet sequence a narrative
which is new in Australian writing, the worldwide adventures of the poet as anti-hero, one who, despite his disappointments, still believes in the power of literature
to create a sense of belonging, and to invoke ‘the deep mandala of meeting and
friendship’.
‘John
Mateer is a poet with a peripatetic sense of self who is fascinated by
cross-cultural historical currents and transformations…his poems frequently
register how history and its associated human ambitions and cruelties taint or
inflect much that we know.’ — Sydney
Review of Books
