Beneath Our Armour


   Peter Bakowski

 
   ISBN 9780980517941
   Paperback, 96 pages
   RRP: $19.95
   Available August 2009

   Order now (links to another site)


  ‘I am amazed at Peter Bakowski’s endurance and proficiency. He has penned an extraordinary body of work   and a new volume is always a joyful occasion. This is not hyperbole.’ — Stephen Cummings


Beneath Our Armour is unique. This sequence of portrait poems covers vast tracts of history, geography, and personae in a way that is at once intimate and epic.

Intimate, because Bakowski imagines his way into the lives of individuals as radically disparate as Cyril Connolly, Diego Rivera, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Smart.

Epic, because he transports us from Krakow in Poland, to Old Macau, and onto Bedford Square, London and even Lower Templestowe in Melbourne — and from pitched battles to civilised dinner parties.

Intense, disturbing and memorable, Beneath Our Armour is an assured and beautifully crafted new book from one of Australia’s finest contemporary poets.


Peter Bakowski was born in Melbourne in 1954 to Polish-German parents. He has been writing poetry for over twenty-five years. His poems have been published in literary magazines worldwide and have been translated into Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Bengali, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Polish. He has been writer-in-residence in Rome, Paris, Macau, Suzhou, Greenmount (Western Australia), Battery Point (Tasmania), Broken Hill (New South Wales), and at the Arthur Boyd estate Bundanon (New South Wales). His first book, In the Human Night, won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry.