Stop Words
Hybrid Publishers, 2011. 98 pp.
I first discovered the concept of "stop words" in 2007, when Wikipedia defined them as "those words which are so common that they are useless to index or use in search engines or other search indexes." I decided that I had to write a book of poems about, or taking their rise from, my list of 87 apparently "useless" words [up, down, to, from, shall...]. These complex, but highly readable and enjoyable poems deal, and with a great source of fun, with the old poetic obsessions with sex, love and death and the tension between the sexes.
Available from Hybrid Publishers
Praise for Stop Words:
"Here is a poet with a most welcome and, as yet, unflagging capacity to surprise." -- Professor Peter
Pierce
"It is a clever, considered, and utterly contemporary piece of work. The central
inspiration for the book is ingenious and the framing of the poems is reinforced by their singular internal
reflexivity and your treatment of the most ancient poetic obsessions of sex, love, death, and so on. Despite
that complex reflexivity, the poems are nonetheless highly readable - dare I say enjoyable? ... I can't
think of anything else that's quite doing this in current Australian poetry: balancing techno-contemporary
(internet search terms) with high-end reflexivity (words about words), and sheer readability (sex and
death)." -- John Hunter
The foreword to this unusual collection of poems is by Dr. Michael
Kindler, Manager of Curriculum Support in the ACT Department of Education and Training in Canberra, in 2010.