Occam's Aftershave

In this new collection, John Watson ranges across a multitude of subjects in his familiarly playful and engaging style. There are many poems about art, including sequences about the painters Max Beckmann and Paul Cezanne and the photographer Lee Miller; a poem in the voice of a Wattle-bird; and the inventive sequence 'Cowpastures', which details the discovery, in the early 1800s near Camden, NSW, of a multitude of cattle descended from a stray herd from the first fleet. Winner of the Blake and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, John Watson has rapidly established himself as one of Australia's most interesting and innovative poets. He is the author of A First Reader, Montale: A Biographical Anthology (Collected Works Volume 1), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's and Adelaide Festival Poetry Prizes, Erasure Traces (Collected Works Volume 2), Views from Mt Brogden and a Dictionary of Minor Poets (Collected Works Volume 3), and Four Refrains.