Aurelia

Description

Poetry. "Hawke's poems mine a labyrinth between world and Being, an irresolvable quest towards comprehension, towards a purity that, for the poet, can only exist as language... AURELIA is a strikingly formidable achievement." Gig Ryan"

John Hawke received his PhD in English from the University of Sydney, where his thesis was awarded the Dame Leonie Kramer Prize in 1999. From 1997-2006, he taught literary theory within the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong. He is now a Senior Lecturer, specializing in poetry, in the Department of English at Monash University. His research has taken a comparative approach to the historical relationship between French Symbolist and Modernist poetics and its influence on contemporary poetry. His book of criticism, Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, surveys the local reception of international Modernism through poets such as Kenneth Slessor and Judith Wright, as well as critics such as A R Chisholm and James McAuley. Hawke also co-edited Poetry and the Trace, a compelling collection of critical essays by poets and scholars, offering fresh and teasing reflections on the art of contemporary poetry. AURELIA (Cordite Books, 2015) is his first poetry collection.