Alex Skovron |
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Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958, aged nearly ten. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. From the early 1970s he worked as an editor for various book publishers in Sydney and Melbourne, in the reference, educational, children’s, trade, and literary fields. He was on the editorial staff of the third edition of The Australian Encyclopaedia (1972–77), and subsequently worked as general editor of The Concise Encyclopaedia of Australia (1977–79). On moving to Melbourne in 1980 he joined Macmillan as an educational editor, and from 1985 was senior editor with Hutchinson, Dent and Houghton Mifflin respectively. From the early 1990s he worked largely from home as a freelance editor. He is married, with two adult children and four grandchildren. Skovron’s poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas. His six published collections to date are: The Rearrangement (1988, winner of the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards for a first collection and shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Awards), Sleeve Notes (1992), Infinite City (1999, shortlisted in the Age Book of the Year and Victorian Premier’s Awards), The Man and the Map (2003), Autographs (a volume of prose-poems, 2008), and Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014, shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for 2015). Other awards for his writing have included the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry (twice), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (twice), the Manuel Gelman Memorial Prize for Literature, and the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize. The numerous public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, Macedonia, Portugal, and on Norfolk Island. Concurrently with his poetry, Alex Skovron has intermittently published in prose: a number of short stories, a novella, and the abovementioned Autographs, which can be read as a collection of microstories. The novella, titled The Poet (2005), was joint winner (with Kate Grenville) of the FAW Christina Stead Award for a work of fiction; it has been translated into Czech and published under the title Básník (2014). The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French by Jacques Rancourt, was published by PEN Melbourne in 2013; and Water Music, a bilingual volume of Chinese translations in the Flying Island series (Macau), came out in 2017. Some of his poetry has also been translated into Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Macedonian and German. His collection of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2017, and has been translated into Czech. |
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The Rearrangement | Sleeve Notes | Infinite City | The Man and the Map |
Autographs | The Poet | The Attic | Towards the Equator |
Water Music | The Man who Took to his Bed | ||
The Rearrangement |
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First published 1988 by Melbourne University Press (hardback, 112 pp., $19.95, out of print). Reprinted 1996 by Octave (paperback, 112 pp., $14.95). Available from the author. Alex Skovron's first collection of poetry presents a diverse poetic landscape in which some of the major preoccupations of our time are explored. Central to these is the journey towards self- knowledge. It is a journey that moves through the discovery, questioning, perhaps even judgment, of history's lessons, both personal and collective; through relationships, observed, intimate and estranged; through music, art and the creative impulse; through faith. The Old World, with its complex legacy, is a recurring concern. Each of the three sections opens and concludes with a longer poem. Within and across the sections, themes overlap and echo, contend and mesh. By means of this framework, epitomized in the structure of the title poem, the circle of experience is drawn together. But the circle is never closed; like the pattern in the glass of a kaleidoscope, it remains restless, open, and ready always to rearrange itself into new patterns and possibilities.
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Sleeve Notes |
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Published 1992 by Hale & Iremonger in association with Golvan Arts (paperback, 88 pp., $12.95, out of print). Available from the author. This highly orchestrated collection – in both the thematic and the musical sense – features three longer poems: the symphonic meditation ‘Quadrilateral’, the autobiographical sonnet sequence ‘The Waterline Poems’, and the twelve-part title suite inspired by the life and music of Mozart. These and the thirty-three other poems that make up the book offer a rich poetic journey – a journey that takes in Berlin and Beijing, Dublin and old Venice, Vietnam, Uluru and the Garden of Eden; a journey where Sisyphus and Nietzsche rub shoulders with Eliot and Hopkins, where Elgar and Mahler encounter Karl Marx and Clark Kent. We come across photographers and fools, flying-boats and fledgling poets, apples, chess games, grammarians, circuses and sleep; there are ants, moths and spiders, flowers and faces – the imagined, the actual and the surreal. And there are the shores of childhood, with their magic, their promise, and their song …
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Infinite City |
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Published 1999 by Five Islands Press (paperback, 118 pp., $13.95). Reprinted 1999. Available from the author. Infinite City is a collection of 100 poems in a ten-line form for which Alex Skovron has coined the name ‘sonnetina’. These sonnetinas speak in many voices, though certain motifs recur and intersect. Rhythm and colour shift from page to page; rhyme-schemes vary, or vanish; fact and invention jostle each other as the form is explored from many angles. The poems reflect upon time and destiny, on culture, language, sex, music and art, on the sacred and the mundane. They investigate terrains both social and inner, probing our daily confrontations with the self. The relation between thought, language, symbol and meaning is a central concern. Although each sonnetina is self-contained, the book can be read as an unfolding journey through the realms and layers of experience. It can also be entered obliquely, along paths that subvert the printed sequence but uncover unexpected echoes and links; or dipped into at random, with individual poems rotated under the light.
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The Man and the Map |
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Published 2003 by Five Islands Press (paperback, 136 pp., $21.95). Available from the author. In his fourth volume of poetry, Alex Skovron revisits many of the concerns explored in his earlier collections: history, language, music, our exchanges with one another, the everyday surrealities of life – and the elusive relation between memory, time and self. The poet probes the terrains of his own past (its truths and fictions), and navigates the territories beyond. His map encompasses the old world and the new; his journey traverses the crossroads of childhood, the webs of adolescence, the jolts and comedies of experience. It takes in strange landscapes and illustrious cities, restless dreams and ghostly fantasies, the outskirts of eternity and the road to hell. Across the horizon, like a distant range discerned from a moving train, hovers the shifting backdrop of the twentieth century.
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Autographs |
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Published 2008 by Hybrid Publishers (paperback, 80 pp., $19.95). The 56 prose-poems that make up this collection explore provinces of the self – time and the allure of memory, the mosaics and masks of identity, fantasy’s realms, eros and the affections, the will to imagination, our shifting perspectives on ‘reality’. The autographs vary in tone and texture, colour and pulse; some resemble miniature stories, others are freely autobiographical, while others again present strange tableaux, searching meditations, or introduce a named, presumably fictitious protagonist. Of especial interest to the author are the poetic dimensions and musical possibilities of prose. While the order of the pieces across the book’s three sections has been carefully plotted, they all stand as self-contained compositions linked, sometimes, by recurring motifs and echoes from one voice to another. Autographs is a book of many voices – and of the many signatures that underwrite our times.
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The Poet |
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Published 2005 by Hybrid Publishers (paperback, 144 pp., $19.95). The Poet is a tale of obsession, art, and the thresholds between day and night. Manfred is a nondescript insurance clerk, inflexibly honest and imbued with a profound sense of order. He is also a prolific poet, but has never tried to publish – until now. The novella traces the events and experiences that befall Manfred in the wake of a single moment’s carelessness, a mistake that will change his life. He enters a maze he must negotiate, between action and paralysis, inspiration and despair, guilt – and the phantom, love. We encounter an eccentric stranger bent on a terrible mission, the publisher of a deceitful new author, and the city that forms a living, shifting backdrop to the interior drama, as Manfred struggles with his predicament, his muse, and the labyrinth of his implacable honesty. It is a journey from common daylight into a darkness flickering with both hope and oblivion; a journey across the fragile web of what we understand as sanity.
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The Attic |
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Published 2013 by PEN Melbourne (paperback, 48 pp., $10.00). Bilingual (parallel text), with translations by Jacques Rancourt. Reprinted 2014. ‘I translate the books of a famous author / before they are written. …’ So begins the title-poem of this parallel-text edition of ten poems by Alex Skovron, with French translations by Jacques Rancourt. Although the selection is not large, it traverses a rich poetic terrain in which some of the poet’s most pressing concerns are explored. The voices of night mingle with importunings from the past and memories of the future; the familiar grows suddenly strange; faith and fable challenge belief; myth and reality quietly intersect; there is longing, and loss, there is music, and the end of time; even a tree that grows from the sky. These are poems that probe the shades and borderlines of our lives, re-imagining who and what we are.
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Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems |
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Published 2014 by Puncher & Wattmann (paperback, 312 pp., $29.95). Reprinted 2015, 2016, 2017. This New & Selected Poems is a substantial and long-awaited compilation from one of Australia’s most accomplished poets, a retrospective spanning more than thirty years. The New Poems section, ‘Towards the Equator’, represents Alex Skovron’s sixth book-length collection and signals a return to the formal variety that has been a hallmark of his work. As always, a distinct Eurocentric sensibility sits alongside an engagement with Western art and culture. All six collections are characterized by close attention to craft, versatility of tone and technique, and a seriousness of intent seasoned at times with wry humour or playful wit. We encounter a rich assortment of voices, moods and scenarios as the landscapes of experience, the playgrounds of the mind and the theatres of the self are negotiated. Music, memory, philosophy, the creative spirit and language itself are focal-points; the dimensions of faith and the elusive quest for self-knowledge colour the shifting light; while Eros, in various guises, accompanies many of the poems across the plains and borderlands of the imagination. Recurring motifs in Skovron’s poetry include the perpetual tussle with history, the search for a clarity of vision, and our often ambiguous relationship with identity, with each other, and with the enigmas of time and remembrance.
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Water Music |
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Published 2017 by Flying Island Books: ASM and Cerberus Press (paperback, 66 pp, $10.00). A diverse, bilingual selection of twenty poems chosen from Alex Skovron’s earlier books and rendered into Chinese by Hong Kong–based translator Xu Daozhi. |
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The Man who Took to his Bed |
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Published 2017 by Puncher & Wattmann (paperback, 160 pp., $29.95). A man wakes up one morning to find an unknown woman in bed beside him. A failed writer devises an ingenious method of plagiarizing the work of others. Whole properties in a suburban neighbourhood begin vanishing overnight. An ancient grand piano is purchased by a mysterious young customer with an old secret. A spontaneous experiment in the paranormal produces an unexpected result … This collection of fourteen short stories is Alex Skovron’s second book of fiction, after his novella The Poet (2005). It introduces an eclectic range of protagonists, predicaments, voices, and narrative styles – playful, earnest, speculative, ironic, intimate, bittersweet, surreal. Between them, the characters we meet span childhood and adolescence, adulthood and old age, and their stories highlight the untoward in the everyday, the transformative in the mundane, the twists and turning-points that can challenge us – and the games we play with others, and with ourselves.
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