Paper Nautilus

I’m very excited to be able to say my first book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, is now available as an ebook through Amazon. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it (and given it’s (a) poetry and (b) has been out of print for more than a decade that’s presumably pretty much everybody) it was first published by Five Islands Press as part of their New Poets Series in 1994, was shortlisted for the National Book Council of Australia’s Banjo Award for Poetry in 1995, and contains a series of poems I wrote between 1991 and 1993.

It’s always strange rereading work you wrote a long time ago, but looking at the book again I’m surprised how well it stands up. Perhaps unusually I didn’t really start writing until I was in my 20s, and because I managed to get published reasonably quickly the poems in Paper Nautilus aren’t just the first things I had published, many of them are amongst the first things I ever wrote. That being the case it’s sort of gratifying to find the book contains not just a number of poems I’m genuinely proud of but a number more I’d forgotten that are surprisingly good (I have to confess I had no memory of ‘Winter Afternoon’ at all until I reread the book). Even more interesting is seeing the way so many of the interests and preoccupations of my fiction were present right from the beginning.

I’ve made a few minor corrections to the text but otherwise the book is as it was when it was first published, except for the very handsome new cover, designed by Who Creative.

There’s more information and a few reviews over on the page I’ve created for the book, but given you can have the whole book for a mere US$2.99, perhaps you’d be better off just hopping over to Amazon and buying a copy.