The forty-eight poems that comprise Letters from the Periphery, Alex Skovron’s seventh book-length collection, are populated by a variety of voices speaking across many settings — from 1960s Sydney to the cafés of today’s Melbourne, from the Trojan War and Byzantine Aleppo to the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno, from eighteenth-century Lisbon to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth, from the American Civil War to warfronts of our time, and of the future. A richly diverse collection, this book also marks Skovron’s return to the longer poem — notably the title-sequence, featuring a mysterious stalker versed in philosophy; the suite The Light We Convert, grounded in the world of nineteenth-century music; and the poet’s translation of the opening Canto from The Divine Comedy.
