Timoshenko Aslanides – February 5 2017

Timoshenko was born to a Greek immigrant father and Australian mother. He began writing poetry while working in the Commonwealth Public Service before becoming a full-time professional poet in 1985. Timoshenko holds a Bachelor of Arts (Music) and a Bachelor of Economics. His first book of poems, The Greek Connection, saw him become the first Australian to win the British Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the best first book of  poetry in English published the previous year in the British Commonwealth, excluding England. His fourth book of poetry, Australian Things, was awarded joint second prize in the 1988 bicentennial poetry awards for book-length collections and was inspired by a remark by Judith Wright who became his mentor and friend. Because he is Australian-born and Australian-focussed, Timoshenko does not identify as an ‘ethnic’ poet; nor does he write ‘multicultural’ poetry. Though he feels that most, if not all of his poetry has its origin in love, the context of this affection is the celebration of the natural and built environments of Australia, and the history and imaginative genius of the people. His other works include Passacaglia and Fugue and the verse drama in nine acts, Versatility or, a justification for poetry, with incidental music from the collected chorales of JS Bach (available on CD) amongst many others.

Temperament: twenty-four love poems, one in each key
Hybrid Publishers, 2013; ISBN 9781925000252
A new collection of love poems, based on each note of the keyboard. Aficionados of music will be familiar with Mozart’s tragic intensity in D and G Minor and E Flat Major, Beethoven’s sublime grandeur in D and C Minor and Chopin’s virtuosic melancholy in A Flat and G Flat Major and F and G Minor. Arguably, these and other composers had these and other preferences for one very good reason: the sound and colour of the tuning of the keys matched the type and mood of the compositions written in them. In place of the distinctive and audible key characteristics of the well-tempered tunings, Aslanides has applied his experience of love to each of the 24 keys in 24 poems. The key sequence for these poems follows the key sequence of each of the two books that make up JS Bach’s 48.

Letterature: Verse letters from Australian women
Hybrid Publishers, 2014; ISBN 9781925000627

“Apart from this present compilation, then, there appear to be no collections of verse-letters written by men in the personas of women since Ovid’s Heroides. I found this quite surprising, because to my accomplished literary taste, such a verse-letter has a number of quite useful qualities, all of which I’ve drawn upon for the letters and diary-entries and reports that I’ve retrospectively placed in the hands of some exceptional Australian women.” – Timoshenko Aslanides