Australian Alphabet
Butterfly Books, 1992. 78 pp.
This book contains 26 poems, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Peter Sculthorpe aptly summarises the book in this extract from his Foreword: "These artistically complex but disarmingly simple and accessible poems deserve the wide readership they will obtain, especially among those Australians who, sensing the irrelevance of European modes of thought in contemporary Australia, want to listen to the resonance of a lyric poetry which celebrates what has made, and continues to make us, what we are."
Now out of print. Available through me.
Praise for Australian Alphabet
"Aslanides uses a middle- to high-level diction, and his poetic forms are similarly 'high' rather than
demotic art...more akin to someone like the later Auden, cosmopolitan and urbane, than to the vernacular
poets. Aslanides is formidably knowledgeable, his range of historical, botanical and geographical references
is unequalled by all but a few poets." -- Lawrence Bourke, Australian Book Review, November
1992
"One of the most original poetic voices in Australia." -- Professor Peter Pierce
(The Canberra Times, 9 January 1993)
"...head shaking admiration...for speaking of
himself to his readers as 'your poet' and defining an Australian as 'anyone with a line of me in memory'" --
Martin Duwell (The Australian, 31 October 1992)