Peter Boyle – October 21 2018

World Polio Day – October 24

Peter is an award-winning poet and translator. He holds a Bachelor or Arts (Hons) in English, Diploma of Education, Master of Arts in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and is completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts. Peter has taught language skills to students from a diverse range of countries and cultures for over 20 years in secondary schools and technical colleges. His interest in the possibilities of language is also reflected in his translations of French and Spanish. Peter has read his poetry at Festivals in Paris, Medellin and Caracas, and his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies internationally. His other poetry collections include Coming Home from the World, The Blue Cloud of Crying, What the Painter Saw in Our Faces, and The Apocrypha of William O’Shaunessy, which marked the beginning of his experimentation with heteronyms and the merging of fiction, poetry and speculation. Peter first began writing poetry in his teens partly as a way of grappling with the effects of childhood polio: “Undoubtedly the need to express myself, to create in a verbal form, was partly motivated in my teen years by insecurity, my sense of shame in my own body as a disabled kid who wanted to create some other self for himself.” (Michael Brennan interview, 2011) He later returned to poetry, publishing his first collection at age 42.

Ghostspeaking
Vagabond Press, 2016; ISBN 9781922181787
Eleven fictive poets from Latin America, France and Quebec. Their poems, interviews, biographies and letters weave images of diverse lives and poetics. In the tradition of Fernando Pessoa, Boyle presents an array of at times humorous, at times tormented heteronymous poets. In their varied voices and styles, writing as they do across the span of the 20th century and into the 21st, these haunted and haunting figures offer one of poetry’s oldest gifts – to sing beauty in the face of death. In all this Boyle, their fictive translator, is deeply enmeshed.

Museum of Space
University of Queensland Press, 2004; ISBN 9780702234637
‘Questioning what it means to be human lies at the heart of this new collection by Peter Boyle. These are poems which intuit that a certain kind of looking is required in order to see. It is a gaze that has retained its human innocence, despite belonging to one who has grown aware through knowledge, experience and understanding. This innocence is the space one must retain in oneself in order to be filled and refilled with life. These poems make this space available to anyone who is willing, with Boyle, to accept that the truth of being alive only “enters us endlessly when there seems to be nothing left to enter us”.’ – MTC Cronin