John A. Scott, St Clair (Picador)
ISBN: 0 330 27197 0     RRP: $15.00

John A. Scott, Translation (Picador)
ISBN: 0 330 27196 2    RRP: $16.00
These two volumes mark the transformation of one of Australia's most acclaimed poets into one of its best loved novelists. Translation contains reworkings of poems by a great range of poets from Ovid to Hocquard, but it also elaborates how the poet seeks to appropriate the lives of others and how he himself is transformed by this act. St Clair, a trio of narratives, was described as "one of the outstanding books of the past decade" by Christopher Pollnitz in 1989.

Matt Simpson, An Elegy for the Galosherman (Bloodaxe Books)
ISBN: 1 85224 103 9    RRP: $14.00
This 'new and selected' collection contains Simpson's best work prior to 1990. Many of these poems look back at his upbringing in Bootle, at family tensions in a close-knit Merseyside community with strong seafaring traditions. W.S. Graham said of them, "...a good hardness coming out of family values and physical working objects...a real special poet."

Tim Thorne, Red Dirt (Paper Bark Press)
ISBN: 0 957801 5 3    RRP: $15.95
The most recent full-sized collection of poems from Thorne, this volume contains the celebrated "White Diamond Gloom" sequence. Gwen Harwood said of it, "The language of poetry and the vigour of common speech are, in Tim Thorne's book, inseparable."

Tim Thorne, Taking Queen Victoria to Inveresk (QVMAG)
ISBN: 0 7246 4800 3    RRP: $10.00
The outcome of a period as poet-in-residence in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in 1996, this collection, beautifully illustrated with full colour photographs by John Leeming, contains, as well as Thorne's poetic response to the collections and programs of the museum, a monograph on the poetry of Eric Scott.

Tim Thorne, The Atlas (Black Lightning Press)
ISBN: 0 949582 00 X    RRP: $5.95
Impossible to obtain new except from Cornford Press, this long semi-autobiographical work places Thorne's childhood and adolescence in the context of historical influences from the Second World War to Vietnam. Of it Michael Sharkey said, "Thorne's images are sharp, memorable, witty. His craftsmanship is everywhere evident - spare, graceful, precise."

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