Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems

Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems is Katherine Gallagher's third book from Arc, and draws together the best work from five of her previous collections, together with a substantial body of new work.

Gallagher is a prolific and popular poet, and this comprehensive new collection will delight her many devotees, both in the UK and in her native Australia. "Katherine Gallagher has an aesthetic purity which combines introspection with an outward focus... Her verse is sometimes simply beautiful, at other times tragically moving, but always technically brilliant." Envoi "Gallagher has always been a poet of quiet observation, meditating on her experiences as a traveler or watching small domestic moments... There can be no doubt that Gallagher's poetry has become more confident and complex over time. The early poems, usually no longer than a page, meditate on an observation or a memory, while her more recent work is more ambitious." Australian Book Review "No word is wasted in Katherine's poems; she effortlessly glides into metaphor, playful inversions and unexpected turns of thought. She has an artist's eye for colour and line, a musician's ear for rhythm, tone and key, and a poet's skill in selection of the best word." Anna Avebury "Carnival Edge not only withstands repeated reading, it invites it. It is a work that demands that it be taken up by poets and explored, so that it can reveal its richnesses, and show further ways in which poetry can be explored... having read Carnival Edge a number of times, I can only say that these prospects excite me enormously." The Australian Reader Katherine Gallagher is a widely-acclaimed poet with six books published as well as four chapbooks. Born in Australia, Gallagher has lived and worked in London since 1979. She has been an active force in the community, giving poetry readings, running workshops (for adults and children), judging poetry competitions, and participating in poetry festivals. Her work has been widely reviewed. Gallagher also translates from the French and her own poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian, Romanian, and Serbian. Her two previous collections are Tigers on a Silk Road and Circus-Apprentice.

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Auteur

Katherine Gallagher was born in 1935 in Maldon, Victoria, graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1963 and taught in Melbourne for five years before moving to Europe, living first in London and then in Paris for nine years. In 1979 she moved back to London, working as a secondary teacher and after 1990, as a poetry tutor for the Open College of the Arts, Jackson's Lane, Barnet College and Torriano, London. During this time she co-edited Poetry London as well as working extensively with primary school children. She is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Writing in Education. In 1978, she was awarded a Writer's Fellowship from the Literature Board, Australia Council, and in 1981, she won the Brisbane Warana Poetry Prize. Her book Passengers to the City (Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985) was shortlisted for the John Bray National Poetry Award. She also writes children's poetry and many of her children's poems have appeared in anthologies. In 1994, her translation from French of Jean-Jacques Celly's poems, The Sleepwalker with Eyes of Clay introduced by Peter Florence, was published by Forest Books, London. In 2000, she was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Award. From 2002-8, she was Education Officer for Writers Inc and was Writer in Residence at Railway Fields Nature Reserve, Harringay, London, July-October, 2002. In 2008, she received a London Society of Authors' Foundation Award. Her poems were featured on the A.B.C's POETICA programme, Radio National in June, 2009. She has read her poetry at festivals and universities in the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy and France and her poems have been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Romanian and Serbian. katherine-gallagher.com

Texte du rabat

This collection draws work from 5 of Gallagher's previous collections, together with a substantial body of new work. Born in Australia, Gallagher moved to Paris before settling in London. She draws on a rich inheritance from these different worlds in her poetry, which is always rooted in a passionate sense of discovery and attention to place.