Alex Skovron

The forty-eight poems that comprise Alex Skovron's seventh book-length collection, Letters from the Periphery, are populated by a variety of voices speaking across many settings - from 1960s Sydney to the cafes of today's Melbourne, from the Trojan War and Byzantine Aleppo to the dark forest of Dante's Inferno, from eighteenth-century Lisbon to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth, from the American Civil War to warfronts of our time, and of the future. A richly diverse gathering, this book also marks Skovron's return to the longer poem - notably the title sequence, featuring a mysterious stalker versed in philosophy; the suite 'The Light We Convert', grounded in the world of nineteenth-century music; and the poet's translation of the opening Canto from The Divine Comedy. Alex Skovron is the author of six previous collections, most recently Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), shortlisted in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. His other books include a prose novella The Poet (2005), joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction, and a volume of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed (2017). Alex's work has been translated into several languages, and his numerous public readings include appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, Macedonia, Portugal, and on Norfolk Island. He lives in Melbourne.

Letters from the Periphery

Sleeve notes: Contemporary Australian Poets 8.

Sleeve Notes

Alex Miller

Raimond Gaita

In the early 1990s, after writing for most of his life in Yiddish, his mother tongue, Jacob Rosenberg decided to switch to English. The period of extraordinary creativity that followed was cut short only by his death in 2008, at the age of 86. During those fifteen-odd years, Rosenberg wrote and published three collections of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel, and two prize-winning memoirs that chart his journey from youth in the Lodz ghetto, through the nightmare of the Holocaust and the loss of his entire family, to the rebuilding of a future in Australia. Singing for All He's Worth brings together twelve men and women from Australian literary and intellectual life who knew Jacob Rosenberg and offer their responses to his writings. It is a colourful and moving collection, each contributor illuminating different facets of Rosenberg's remarkable mind and personality. As Raimond Gaita points out in his foreword: "All the contributors to this volume were his friends. All esteemed him as a man and as a writer. Many loved him. The love and the esteem are warmly evident in the essays. Singing for All He's Worth will enrich the experience of those already familiar with Rosenberg's work, while helping to introduce him to a new community of readers.

Alex Skovron

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