Night Train

by Anthony Lynch

ISBN 9780980712087
78pp. Paperback. RRP $20.00

Anthony Lynch's poetry persuades us into its unique atmosphere, rich with detail - a loved car anthropomorphises, '‘a yacht club's dry dock / is a bookcase for boats’', 'The first magpie / undoes the dark'. These poems hymn and lament the world. Canola is spray-painted across paddocks; 'a television / talks to the walls'. There is variety in style from resonant pantoums to the fittingly halting 'Elegy' - 'a short speech of road / where the blackbird strings up worms / plaques buttoning earth'. Lynch’s meticulous description subtly implicates rather than specifies in these tightly wrought poems that finish unexpectedly, the endings often an entrance to the poem - 'Now, here is my opening'. The book's last section is a meditation on mortality, with its awkward suburban mourners and callous duck shooters, but also a tower of memory that reels back to its origin, to birth, the night train leading into day.

– Gig Ryan

Anthony Lynch lives on the Bellarine Peninsula where he writes poetry, fiction and reviews. His work has appeared in The Age, Best Australian Poems, Island and Southerly, and been read on ABC Radio National. His short story collection Redfin (Arcadia) was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. He is publisher at the independent publishing house Whitmore Press and an editor at Deakin University.

c 2006 - 2011 Clouds of Magellan ABN 82 261 609 306