Michael Farrell is the most adventurous and experimental of contemporary Australian poets, continually pushing the boundaries of what poetry can do. Highly regarded for the playful rhythms and comic, gestural qualities of his poetry, his poems set language, syntax and punctuation in motion. His eye for metaphor and the unexpected combination, for punning and the letter – in both its verbal and visual aspects – gives his poetry its unique humour and energy. In poems like ‘AC/DC As First Emu Prime Minister’, ‘Sheep, Golden Syrup, Elizabeth Bishop’, and ‘Cate Blanchett And The Difficult Poem’, I Love Poetry scrambles a landscape of colloquial and obscure images.
Michael Farrell’s
collections include living at the z, ode ode (shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award), BREAK ME OUCH, a raiders guide (published by Giramondo in 2008), thempark and thou sand. His second collection with Giramondo, Open Sesame (2011) was shortlisted for
the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry. Cocky’s
Joy (Giramondo 2015) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary
Award for Poetry. He was the winner of the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He
is the author of a work of literary criticism, Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945
(Palgrave Macmillan).
