Letters from the Periphery

The forty-eight poems that comprise Alex Skovron's seventh book-length collection, Letters from the Periphery, are populated by a variety of voices speaking across many settings - from 1960s Sydney to the cafes of today's Melbourne, from the Trojan War and Byzantine Aleppo to the dark forest of Dante's Inferno, from eighteenth-century Lisbon to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth, from the American Civil War to warfronts of our time, and of the future. A richly diverse gathering, this book also marks Skovron's return to the longer poem - notably the title sequence, featuring a mysterious stalker versed in philosophy; the suite 'The Light We Convert', grounded in the world of nineteenth-century music; and the poet's translation of the opening Canto from The Divine Comedy. Alex Skovron is the author of six previous collections, most recently Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), shortlisted in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. His other books include a prose novella The Poet (2005), joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction, and a volume of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed (2017). Alex's work has been translated into several languages, and his numerous public readings include appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, Macedonia, Portugal, and on Norfolk Island. He lives in Melbourne.