[POETRY] Weather Event / Merry War (of Never Meeting and Never Ending) / Clouded / Catullan Rag LXV-LXXXI

Melbourne : Life Before Man (Gazebo Books), December 2023. “Red-Letter Series”. 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. Claire Gaskin Weather Event, 24 pp.; 2. LK Holt Merry War (of Never Meeting and Never Ending), 24 pp.; 3. Philip Mead Clouded, 28 pp.; 4. Peter Rose Catullan Rag LXV-LXXXI, 20 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 third instalment of four titles in the Red-Letter series, offered only as a complete set of four chapbooks. 

The poets:

Claire Gaskin’s first full-length poetry collection a bud was published by John Leonard Press in 2006, and was shortlisted for the John Bray SA Festival Awards for Literature. Paperweight (2013) and Eurydice Speaks (2021) were published by Hunter Publishers. Her fourth collection Ismene’s Survivable Resistance was completed as the creative component of her PhD in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, and was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. Her work has appeared in a range of literary journals nationally and internationally since 1986, and her poems have regularly featured in anthologies, including Best Australian Poems 2009, 2010, 2013.

LK Holt’s first collection of poems, Man Wolf Man, won the 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Awards. Patience, Mutiny shared the 2011 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. Her collection Keeps was longlisted for the 2015 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her fourth full-length collection Birth Plan was shortlisted for the 2020 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry and the Grace Leven Prize, and has been longlisted for the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal.

Philip Mead’s poetry books include Be Faithful Go (Angus & Robertson, 1980), The Spring-Mire (Brindabella Press, 1982), and This River is in the South (University of Queensland Press, 1984).  Between 1987 and 1994, he was Poetry Editor at Meanjin, and edited, with John Tranter, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1981). From 2009 to 2018 he was the inaugural Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. His critical study Networked Language: History & Culture in Australian Poetry won the 2010 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literary Scholarship. His most recent collection is Zanzibar Light, published by Vagabond Press in 2018.

Peter Rose is a poet, novelist, memoirist and critic, and Editor of Australian Book Review. In 2001, he published Rose Boys, a family memoir which won the National Biography Award in 2003. He has published six collections of poetry, including The House of Vitriol (Picador Poetry, 1990), Donatello in Wangaratta (Hale & Iremonger, 1998), and The Subject of Feeling (UWA Publishing, 2015). His fifth book Crimson Crop won a 2012 Queensland Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Since the 1980s, he has written and published an on-going series of satires and elegies in the Catullan style, known as The Catullan Rag, of which this Red-Letter chapbook forms part.