Peter Minter is a leading Australian poet, editor and scholar.
From 2011 he is the poetry editor of Overland, the most radical of Australia’s enduring literary and cultural magazines.
“Since the mid 1990s, Peter Minter has caused a sensation in Australia through his exploration of the ecology that emerges where language, subjectivity and poetics meet in the texture and tissue of poetry. Minter’s work has generally reinvigorated debates about poetry’s function and form in Australia in terms of its relation to hermeneutics as much as to phenomenological representation. More simply, it investigates the tangled cultural and political web we are weaving when we find our way through language to touch on being.
“From the testing of the lyric in his first book Rhythm in A Dorsal Fin, which was shortlisted for the 1996 New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, to the Mallarmean echoes of Empty Texas [The Age Poetry Book of the Year, 2000], up to the most recent Homeric wanderings of blue grass, Minter’s work has remained exceptional for its ability to enter language as a landscape, to negotiate the interstices of culture and nature and to play with and deploy the conceits of poetry and the subject, often mock-heroic and sometimes unreconstructed. Within the accumulation and agglomeration of its slabs of syllabics, it continually creates a lush and organic song headlong into the fragmentation through which perception is renewed as language.
“Pam Brown says it best: ‘Peter Minter, irrational Mallarmiste for a new generation, write on!’”
By Michael Brennan, Poetry International Web
To contact Peter Minter, please write to peterminter [blah] gmail [blah] com
To visit Peter Minter at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney, go here.