[POETRY] Notes on Tomb-Sweeping / Thuggery, Buggery, Skullduggery Inc. (a lustration) / From Midnight to Dawn / Mirror Landscape (number 19/25)

Melbourne : Life Before Man (Gazebo Books), December 2024. “Red-Letter Series” [number four]. Limited edition of 25 numbered and signed copies. Four volumes, uniform octavo (210 x 120 mm), each title in chapbook format with original woodcut wrappers by Phil Day, comprising 1. Eileen Chong Notes on Tomb-Sweeping, 28 pp; 2. Dan Disney Thuggery, Buggery, Skullduggery Inc. (a lustration), 20 pp; 3. Stephen Edgar From Midnight to Dawn, 24 pp; 4. Lisa Gorton Mirror Landscape, 28 pp.

Life Before Man, the poetry imprint of Gazebo Books, embarked on a new initiative in 2021. Its Red-Letter series consists of poetry chapbooks representing new work by major award-winning Australian poets. Each title is issued in a strictly limited edition of 25 numbered and signed copies. The chapbooks come with original woodcut wrappers, created especially for the series by Melbourne artist Phil Day.

Douglas Stewart Fine Books is honoured to be the sole distributor of the fourth instalment (of four) in the Red-Letter series, to be offered only as a complete set of four chapbooks. 

The poets:

Eileen Chong

Sydney poet Eileen Chong was born in Singapore of Hakka, Hokkien and Peranakan (Straits Chinese) descent. She has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being We Speak of Flowers (UQP, 2025). Her poems have been shortlisted for major awards, including the Anne Elder Award, the Australian Arts in Asia Award, the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Multicultural Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Victorian Literary Award for Poetry, and twice for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. In 2024, she was awarded the prestigious BR Whiting Studio Residency in Rome. Her first collection, Burning Rice, is on the New South Wales English syllabus in Australia as a prescribed text for the Higher School Certificate from 2019, the first ever collection of poems by an Asian-Australian poet to be on the list.

Dan Disney

Dan Disney is an Australian poet whose previous collections include and then when the, published by John Leonard Press in 2011, and either, Orpheus, published by UWA Publishing in 2016. His latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

Stephen Edgar 

Sydney-based poet Stephen Edgar has been described by Clive James as standing out “among recent Australian poets for the perfection of his craft.” He is the author of numerous collections, including Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground (2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2009), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), and Ghosts of Paradise (2023); and his poetry has received many awards: the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the inaugural Australian Book Review Poetry Prize in 2005, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature, and he has twice received the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his collection The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems.

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton is a Melbourne-based poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of Australian Book Review. She studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. She has published four poetry collections, all from Giramondo, and a novel, The Life of Houses (2015). Her awards include the Victorian Premiers Prize for Poetry, the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, the NSW Premiers People’s Choice Award for Fiction, and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry. In 2024, she was awarded a Creative Australia BR Whiting residency in Rome to complete the poems in Mirror / Landscape.