Kangaroo Unbound
Kangaroo Unbound is a collection of 50 poems that take their titles and inspiration from legendary Australian artist Garry’s Shead’s iconic ‘D.H. Lawrence’ series of paintings, which he produced in the early 90s in response to Lawrence’s 1923 novel Kangaroo. Like the paintings, the poems range from the heavily influenced (those that lean into the source text with strong ekphrastic fidelity) to those that offer more abstracted and personal renderings. Traversing a range of forms from free verse to concrete, villanelle and sonnet, the poems draw from a host of readily identifiable national motifs in their effort toward a contemporary Australian mythology grounded in ‘Benevolence, Humour and Divine Mystery’.
Luke Johnson is a writer and academic from Wollongong, NSW. His poems, stories, essays and criticism are widely published in Australia and have won or been listed for numerous national prizes, including the AAWP Chapter One Prize, the Elizabeth Jolley Award, the Josephine Ulrick Award, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Award as well as several development fellowships. He is the author of the short story collection Ferocious Animals (Recent Work Press 2021) and a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong.
