I Con: New and Selected Poems

I Con: New and Selected Poems represents the best examples of poetry from the career of Tim Thorne, a career spanning over forty years and a dozen collections. It contains something for every area of interest, from delicate love lyrics to witty and sardonic comments on political matters. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the book traces the development of this remarkable poet from the early pieces such as “Star” and “Launceston” with their often raw and violent imagery through to his recent A Letter to Egon Kisch, a major contribution to the epistolary poetic canon in the tradition of Byron and Auden. It also contains a selection of the dramatic monologues from his highly acclaimed The Streets Aren’t For Dreamers and a number of the pieces based on Australian history and on Australian paintings written in the 1990s. Among the previously unpublished works included here is his series “Trainstations from European Poets”, deliberate mistranslations of well-known anthology pieces, which are not just fun, but contain new insights into old favourites. Deeply personal poems about the death of his mother, about the father he never knew, about his baby daughter and about a friend dying of a heroin overdose avoid sentimentality and forge tough art out of delicate subjects. They sit at perfect ease alongside meditations on Antarctic exploration, on the meeting of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie or on the Iraq War. I Con does what its title suggests, but you’ll be glad it does.

Table of contents

Proem: Emoh Ruo
Poems 1968 — 1973
Star
Hustler
High Country
Sideflower
Voyage of the Eye
Whatever Happened to Conway Twitty?
Launceston
Highway
Somewhere Between Waxahachie and Woonsocket
Advice to a Popular Hero
Man and Law
Sydney’s Drowning
Western Addition
California
Elegy for Jenny
Aubade
Autumn
Poems 1974 — 1979
Grammar
Jet Lag
Squad
Roulette
Five Trees
Clare
Bag of Shit
80° 08’ 1934
Polheim
The Worst Journey in the World
Onyx River
Mawson Alone
Growth
Melody for a Hard Summer
Underground
Vanzetti
Blade
Bolt
Song for Seychelles
from The Atlas (1982)
I
II
III
V
Interlude (The boy …)
VII(By the Greystone bed …)
XVI
Poems 1980 — 1989
Left
Fluid
Low Tide, North Esk
Brady’s Lookout
Macquarie House
Reds
Bane
Tight
To Ashes
On/Against the Wall
Launching, By George
Petty Sessions
Songs of the Protest Era
from The Streets Aren’t for Dreamers (1995)
The Cull
Rat’s Song
Stage Dive
Roadkill
Advice
Words for K
Bouncer
Escort
Busking
Arriving in Devonport
Bear
from Taking Queen Victoria to Inveresk (1997)
Comrade Revenant
The Last Muster of the Aborigines at Risdon
Low Tide
Fruit and Flowers
Sunday in the Gardens
Naming the Sensation No 2
Sydney Cove
Bound to Please
Led
Poems 1990 — 1999
Leipzig
To Adrian Paunescu
Crash
The Living are Left with Imagined Lives Cold War
When the Saints Go Marching Out
Love Poem for Stephanie
Don Gibson and Etymology
Erechtheus 33’s Apologia
Poem for Port Arthur
Aerodynamics
Speaking for Myself
The Aisles
Brontë Country
Mother and Son
For My Father
Keeping the Dream Alive
from aUStralia (2004)
Oosutoraria
Vinegar Hill
Pinchgut
Spider Dance and Horse Whip
Mandarin of the Crystal Button
Coningham v Coningham
Black Cat and Wooden Shoe
Lockout
The Mayor
Tanah Merah
Advent 21/12/1967
Sight Screen
Poems 2000—2006
Et in Acadia Ego?
Dry
Zig-Zag Track
Scapeland
Writing the World
Meditation on Parliament House, Canberra 2002
Elegance
Chemically Sharpened
Mesopotamian Suite
South-Western Baptist
Meditations on Ms Westbury’s Precepts
Celebritocracy
Dentist’s Waiting Room
Red Label
There are No Kangaroos in Austria
Elegy for Sandra Dee
Dolphins off Sikinos
The Death of Reason
Roncesvalles: Men at Work
from Trainstations from European Poets
The Bawd, the Lair and Albert Ross
Do We Know Elly Gee?
An Evening in the Trakl Night Club
Stone No 5: Osip and the Minor Celebrity
from Letter to Egon Kisch
excerpt from Section II
excerpt from Section VIII