Books published by Puncher & Wattmann

Has there been an Australian poet as troubadorish and piratical as Duncan Hose? The work is a response to an imaginary Auden's (or someone's) pronouncement that poetry be playful or drunken speech, linguistically badly behaved - more sweet-sounding than anything I can think of in Australian English. - Michael FarrellBorn in Van Diemen's Land, Duncan Hose is the author of Rathaus, One Under Bacchus and Bunratty. A shillelagh is a blackthorn club used variously as a walking stick, a companion, and a weapon. A Jewelled Shillelagh is what you have in your hands.

Australia needs to appreciate its poets - what they think, how they work, how they conceive of creativity, and the extent to which their work offers important insights into the human condition. This volume offers a pathway to such an understanding. It presents a collection of fascinating, candid and diverse interviews with ten of Australia's most distinguished poets, each interview crammed with eloquent insights and quirky observations, and homing in on different ways to approach creative activity. I recomment it to everyone with an interest in Australian writing and culture, and to lovers of poetry everywhere. - Paul Hetherington

In Sheet Music, John Upton's second collection of poetry, his meditations on people and places are at the same time moving and personal, and sweepingly international. These poems travel: they make pit-stops in both strange and familiar territory, they linger at destinations. They take you on a wild ride through a range of deftly-handled poetic forms, and always they touch down on the human heart.Upton has a gift for dark humour, understated irony and incisive imagery, and his vision ranges from the impact of broken relationships and our connection with other sentient creatures, to the futility of war and empty patriotism. Through often unexpected analogies and startling imagery, his poems probe the nature and progress of grief and illness, and the ways the body, and the body politic, can betray the self. At times colloquial and irreverent, or formal and imagistic, they affirm the radiance that can be found all around and within us, despite the provisionality and chaos of existence."In Embracing the Razor, Upton handles an impressive range of forms, from free verse to couplets and more intricate rhyming structures... The poems of grief and adjustment are poignant and often darkly humorous... Upton's work is compelling and will prove deservedly popular." - Aidan Coleman, The Australian"Embracing the Razor displays many of the same skills and talents that have informed John Upton's playwriting career... Emotion is hidden beneath precise description, but pushes itself to the fore through juxtaposed images and recollections, with the kind of volte-face and summary last line we will learn to expect from this poet." - Margaret Bradstock, Southerly"Though the first section may be the most moving, the second is the most acute. Upton has a mordant eye for society's contradictions... In the face of such skill, it's difficult to remember that Embracing the Razor is actually Upton's debut collection." - Geoff Page, Australian Book ReviewJohn Upton was a professional dramatist for 27 years. He was scriptwriter for more than twenty Australian television series, and had five stage plays produced over his career as a writer. His political comedy Machiavelli, Machiavelli won the Australian Writers Guild's award for Best New Play in 1985. John's first poetry collection is Embracing the Razor (2014).

On First Looking publishes poems by student writers at Avondale College of Higher Education alongside work by some of Australia's best contemporary poets. It is the fifth volume in a project which has run over the last decade, and like the books it follows, this anthology introduces a diverse range of poetic voices and places them within the context of a wider poetic community. With a nod in homage to John Keats' poem 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', this collection celebrates a long tradition of connections between writers. It is a unique showcase for work by new and mature poets, all of them united by poetry's gift of bringing us the world as if it has been looked at for the very first time. -JEAN KENT