John Watson – January 23 2022

John is an award-winning poet who has rapidly established himself as one of Australia’s most interesting and innovative poets. Born in the Bland District of NSW in 1939, he has worked in various jobs, including fruit picking and working as a high school Mathematics teacher for 30 years, taking early retirement at 55 and taking up writing poetry full-time. John’s other works include River Syllabics, Four Refrains, Twenty-four poems and the individual titles that have been collated into his collected works volumes: A First Reader, Montale: A Biographical Anthology (Collected Works Volume 1), Erasure Traces (Collected Works Volume 2), Views from Mt Brogden and A Dictionary of Minor Poets (Collected Works Volume 3), and Three Painters (Collected Works Volume 5).

Occam’s Aftershave (Collected Works Volume 4)
Puncher & Wattmann, 2102; ISBN 9781921450518
In this new collection, John Watson ranges across a multitude of subjects in his familiarly playful and engaging style. There are many poems about art, including sequences about the painters Max Beckmann and Paul Cézanne and the photographer Lee Miller; a poem in the voice of a Wattle-bird; and the inventive sequence ‘Cowpastures’, which details the discovery, in the early 1800s near Camden, NSW, of a multitude of cattle descended from a stray herd from the first fleet.

Three Obituaries and an Afternoon Tea
Ginninderra Press, 2021; ISBN 9781761091292
The lives celebrated in Three Obituaries are of three diverse twentieth century figures: Jeanne Claude (1935-2009), Sophie Moss (1917-2009) and Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010). Jeanne Claude, the partner of the field artist Christo, was a prime mover in all their projects. Sophie Moss, born in Poland, embodied the wide-ranging turbulence of Europe during the war years. Mandelbrot famously discovered and named fractals, thereby altering the public perception of Geometry. For each of these figures, Watson devises epyllions, making of each life a lyrical epic. The Afternoon Tea is a Chekhovian affair shared with the poet Joseph Brodsky.