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John Tranter

John Tranter

John Tranter’s two latest books Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (2006) and Starlight: 150 Poems (2010), have together won six major Australian awards. A new book, Heart Starter, will be published in 2014 in Australia and the United States. He received a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and is an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney School of Letters, Arts and Media and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published more than twenty collections of verse, and has edited six anthologies. He founded the free Internet magazine Jacket in 1997 and granted it to the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, he is the founder of the Australian Poetry Library at <http://poetrylibrary.edu.au> which publishes over 40,000 Australian poems online, he founded the Journal of Poetics Research at poeticsresearch.com, and he has a Journal at johntranter.net and a vast homepage at johntranter.com.


Rolling Column| 'Thank God for the Bourgeoisie' by John Tranter

October 1995, no. 175 • 01 October 1995
Have you noticed what’s happened to the daiquiri? It’s been reinvented, by the Teen Literati. Now it doesn’t seem fair to blame the Industrial Revolution for what happened to the daiquiri, or to Writing in Australia in the 1990s, but the Industrial Revolution started it – you know, the steam engine, World Wars, radiation poisoning, filter-­tipped cigarettes, Mickey Mouse, germ-free ham ... (read more)

John Tranter reviews 'Desert Mother' by Philip Collier

October 1982, no. 45 • 01 October 1982
Desert Mother is a collection of poems from a West Australian writer in his late twenties who now lives in Sydney. Many of the poems in it have a double layer of nostalgia – a personal one, for a lost adolescence, and a general one for small towns left on the edge of history. The book’s epigraph, a quote from James Taylor, contains the phrase ‘this is just a small-town city’. Such places ... (read more)

John Tranter reviews 'The Long Game and Other Poems' by Bruce Beaver

April 2005, no. 270 • 01 April 2005
The Sydney poet Bruce Beaver died in February 2004 after a long struggle with kidney failure that kept him on dialysis for more than a decade. He was seventy-six years old. Beaver was seen as a sympathetic older figure by many poets of my generation, born a dozen years later. I met him when I was in my twenties, and found him to be a generous friend. When the poet Michael Dransfield, younger still ... (read more)