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Pam, John, Rae, Ken

Dissolving the wall between poetry and living
by
April 2025, no. 474

Metropole: New poems by Ken Bolton

Puncher & Wattmann, $27 pb, 155 pp

Pam, John, Rae, Ken

Dissolving the wall between poetry and living
by
April 2025, no. 474

‘Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

Metropole: New poems

Metropole: New poems

by Ken Bolton

Puncher & Wattmann, $27 pb, 155 pp

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