Salute

A work that shifts from high to low, philosophical, to ethical, to comic, in Bolton's well known, and highly praised, flexible style. A new collection from a prolific poet.

Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem's jib, there the poise & rancour of another. For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some moment of last judgement & wave at the gate keeper, a tall and bearded dude, surely a hipster - avant la lettre but also after it - outside of time in fact, where final judgements are, and truth and poetry. You wave it at him. It's a talisman, dude, you sau. 'An earnest,' says the figure, 'of your capacity for cool and rigour?' He nods and you smile. You both smile - and he waves you in.

Praise for Ken Bolton:

"... bitchy, dreamy, acute ... a deeply serious - & witth * clmost self-canceling - consciousness at work" - Lynn McCredden, Heat

"Easy to appreciate, lightheartedness is not a natural or easy gift, and Bolton's - brilliantly articulate - shimmers with a sense of being "amusing & sort of/crooked in relation to things." - Nicholas Birns, Transnational Literature

About the author:

A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide and edits Little Esther books.