Necessary Wonder
In Necessary Wonder Peter Bakowski prescribes an antidote to faceless demographics and statistics, drawing the reader back to the sanctity of the individual through a series of portraits of real and fictitious persons.
From the hapless to the heroic, the laconic to the loquacious, the creative to the criminal, these portraits reveal the poet's lasting fascination with people and personae. But they transcend mere personality to locate the human experience in the world, juxtaposing contemporary urban poetry against poems set in rural New South Wales and Gippsland.
Intimate and memorable, these are beautifully crafted poems interwoven with wry humour as a kind of philosophical shrug at the world.
Peter Bakowski was born in Melbourne in 1954 and has been writing and publishing poems for over forty years, His books include In The Human Night, winner of the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and most recently a linked series of collaborations with Ken Bolton. His poems have appeared in over one hundred literary magazines worldwide, predominantly in English but also in Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Bengali, German, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Mandarin and French.
