About

Poetry can be enjoyable! Poetry can be fun! Too often, what's served up as contemporary verse is incomprehensible, self-indulgent, pompous, trite, dead-boring or just doesn't communicate. But it doesn't have to be! It can cast a shrewd observant eye over our foibles and inconsistencies, treating them with gentle mockery or savage ridicule. It can be wicked too, and wickedly amusing. Here's poetry that's accessible, poetry to share with your friends or your favourite other, poetry for the pub or the stage. It's bawdy, perverse and on occasion irreverent, often carnal but seldom if ever obscene.

Bawdy Per Verse & Irreverent showcases a range of fine contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets writing about bodies, breasts, sex, love, lust, age, genitalia, profanity, religion, marriage, divorce, affairs, condoms, excreta, psychiatry, lesbian lovers, fundamentalism, conservation, ecology, royalty, God...

Use it for birthdays, parties, graduations, Valentines, Christmas. And keep several at home for yourself -- you know how seldom borrowers return good books!

Proudly published by Post Pressed

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Reviews

Not for the inhibited, not for the shy, not for the 'Victorian sensibilities' - this book is brash, bawdy, ribald and ... fun! The one necessity is a rabellaisian sense of humour.

The editors set out to prove that poetry 'can cast a shrewd dry observant eye over our foibles and inconsistencies, treating them with gentle mockery or savage ridicule.' Read, for instance, the first poem Big Boobs, by Gloria B Yates:

'see me clumping down the street
dragged by the dogs on a double leash
with my big boobs wobbling
wobbling all over
who's taking who for a walk they say ...'

and smile at the picture created. The reader is drawn into poems such as Kate O'Neill's Dear Miss Dix:

'I'm a lousy lover
and I've been told
I should use all the practice I can get
and yet
I keep on having to say ...
I'm sorry ...'

and keeps reading.

Which is not to say that Knight and Samuelowicz have avoided serious subjects. The longest poem in the book, Ouyang Yu's Written by a Chinese Prostitute is thoughtful, oddly poignant, and thought-provoking,

'my body is the universal language that requires no learning
my body is the world map that covers all the territories of desires'

and on to the poem's amazing last line. Janice M Bostok's When It's Over It Isn't is difficult but rewarding with swiftly turned images that tell a story.

Some of the poems are indeed irreverent, but pithy. Gloria B Yates' I will Lift up mine Eyes Unto the Hills starts with a take-off of Psalm 121 and moves successfully to Psalm 23 with bitter comment on first environmental and then media pollution.

Brenda Lewis' sketches are unobtrusively suggestive and definitely enhance the anthology.

The editors want us to know that poetry 'can be wicked too, and wickedly amusing.' And they succeed with this eclectic collection of poetry that is lascivious, 'on occasion even irreverent, often carnal but seldom if ever obscene.' In fact, this collection never crosses the border into obscenity, funny it is, indecent it is - a great book to share with friends over a beer, or to browse through with a like-minded partner.

Joanna M. Weston, Canada

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Extract

Regrets, Regrets

by Kate O'Neill

Shakespeare wasted his talents
devising stage entertainments
when he should have been
honing his poems.
It worried him a lot
but he needed the money.

And Da Vinci knew
that all things done by hand
were ephemeral
and second-rate
and he got to begrudge time
not spent in pure thought.

But what I really should have done
was to have a lot more fun
fighting and fucking and farting
singing, dancing
spacerdpursuing
spacerdspacerdswearing
spacerdspacerdspacerdwooing
blackening eyes and kicking bums
spacerdeating
spacerdspacerddrinking
spacerdspacerdspacerdbelching
but I dare say that's always true
spacerdspacerdof a lady.

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