Puncher & Wattmann
invite you to a booklaunch -
Ken Bolton's Sly Mongoose
(launch speechette by Pam Brown)
at
The Fiend in Hand
58 Cowper Street, Glebe
Sunday 5th June 3-5pm
Sly Mongoose deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide
art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s
and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame
from the point of view of an ‘ordinary punter’, a beaver, a worried
mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of
travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly
structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems
deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John
Forbes.
Ken Bolton is self-described as a gay, light-hearted bastard, who cuts
a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape,
his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him,
bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid.
Ken Bolton has published a good deal of art criticism, some of it
collected in Art Writing (Contemporary Art Centre of South
Australia). He edited Homage To John Forbes (Brandl & Schlesinger)
and wrote the monograph Michelle Nikou. He edited the magazines 'Magic Sam' and 'Otis Rush' and has published many books of poetry. Wakefield Press published The Circus in 2010 and Vagabond Press A Whistled Bit Of Bop. His earlier titles from Wakefield Press are At The Flash And At The Baci and Untimely Meditations.
