Books by Kevin Densley

'Kevin Densley's new poetry collection offers a gently ironic look at the blind spots in our everyday odyssey through life. We are carried into a contemporary small town mindscape built atop the white and infinite marble of ancient myth, infiltrated by pop culture and urban legend. These poems offer a sensuous evaluation of life, which does not exclude tragic overtones. We journey and are caught in those moments in which the struggle to go on and forward is stifled by boredom, self doubt, exhaustion, yet there is always a sense of delicate beauty dreaming somewhere below the horizon. Kevin Densley has the same easygoing intimacy with classic literature as with the modern mindset and these commingle in his poetry so that Dionysus nudges up against modern hero-rulers and their assassins as easily as two Sunday drinkers in a country pub, exchanging the odd laconic aside or knowing nod.' - Isobelle Carmody

Kevin Densley's poetry has been published in various Australian and UK magazines over the past fifteen years, including Quadrant, The Adelaide Review, LiNQ, Muse, New England Review, Vernacular, Mattoid, Redoubt, Verandah, Tamba, Space, Other Poetry (UK), The Journal (UK), Cadenza (UK), Monkey Kettle (UK) and Buzzwords (UK). His work has also appeared in two UK anthologies, Miracle and Clockwork: the Best of Other Poetry Series 2 and Now That's What I Call Monkey Kettle. In addition, he writes plays with Steve Taylor. These have been performed Australia-wide and in the USA. With Steve, he has co-authored twelve books and one CD - mainly play collections for young people. Their latest book is the play Last Chance Gas, published by Currency Press in 2003.

';With Orpheus in the Undershirt, Kevin Densley has produced his best book yet: sharp but not cutting, tart but not cynical, the collection weaves lyric, barb and lament into a marvellous, prickly garment that soothes as it stimulates. Don't like small, evocative poems as clear and complex as rockpools? Dive into an eight-page outlaw fistfight roaring with dust and despair. Not interested in ';When Johnstone's Circus Came to Town'? (Though why wouldn't you be, with its ';toupeed ringmaster/in a red lame suit' and aromatic ';strong whiff of manure'?) Explore instead the death of a bantam ';inside the chookhouse/among the warm chooky smells'. Unlike most collections which attempt to blend ';high' and ';low' culture, to find the charge of destiny in the nuts and bolts of the everyday, Orpheus does it effortlessly, without need of gimmicks or creaky, overbearing conceits. Here Kevin Densley fuses the marvels and mundanities of life into a witty, searching collection that sings the subtleties of both.' James Roderick Burns, Other Poetry