Light and Shadow

As one of the few Australian poets with an extensive publishing history overseas as well as in Australia, John Tranter suffers from the problem of what might be called parallel publishing. His UK books are often built out of selections from his Australian books. Just under half the poems in his new book, Studio Moon (published by Salt, and distributed in Australia by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press), have appeared before, notably in At the Florida (1993). But the best from that book has been chosen, the new poems are exciting, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously powerful, entertaining and revealing.

What Studio Moon gives us is a conspectus of one of Australia’s greatest poets in mid-career, a phase beginning in 1988 after the publication of Under Berlin: New Poems 1988 (1988). This is a period dominated by a fascination with the processes of generating poetry, both in form and meaning. It begins with Tranter’s finding a computer programme, ‘BreakDown’, which analysed the frequency of letter repetition in any given text and was able to generate parodies that (after much editing), while clearly and eerily in the style of the original, are wildly surreal. One of the earliest poems in Studio Moon, ‘Her Shy Banjo’, derives from some pages of John Ashbery (its title anagrammatises his name) and was published in 1991 together with an explanatory article, ‘Dogs in All the Unregarded Bales: Mr Rubenking’s “BreakDown”’.