Peter Minter – April 8 2018

Peter is a leading poet, editor and scholar of English, Scottish and Aboriginal ancestry. His other poetry works include Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin; Morning, Hyphen; and In the Serious Light of Nothing and he has been published in Australian and international anthologies. In addition to poetry, Peter has published literary criticism and reviews, edited journals and anthologies, including co-editing the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008) and, with the Chilean Embassy of Australia, a bi-lingual anthology of Chilean Indigenous Mapuches and Australian Aboriginal poetry entitled Earth Mirror. He co-founded and co-edited the poetry journal Cordite Poetry and Poetics Review, was the founding editor of the Varuna New Poetry broadsheet, co-editor of Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, and has been poetry editor of Meanjin and Overland. Peter’s career in Indigenous education and literature has included teaching at the Durali Aboriginal Centre, Western Sydney University, assisting in the development of the university’s first Bachelor of Aboriginal Studies degree and writing its first subject in Aboriginal literature. He is currently Lecturer in Indigenous Studies at the Koori Centre, The University of Sydney.

Empty Texas
Paper Bark Press, 1999; ISBN 9789057040368
Following the success of his first volume, Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin, which made Minter the youngest poet ever to be shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 1996, Empty Texas represents a maturing and broadening of his scope and vision. It scrutinizes relations between language, sensuality, and cognition, and articulates a view of life and death which is utterly honest and uncompromising.
‘Without doubt, Minter’s innovations place him in the advance guard of a new vision of Australian poetry.’ – Louis Armand, Meanjin

Blue Grass
Salt Publishing, 2006; ISBN 9781844712465
This is a major work of lyrical complexity and ethical vision, a turning point for a maturing and daring imagination. Arranged across four parts with an interwoven series of innovative sonnets, the poems are alert and readable, their sensual intelligence concentrated on extraordinarily everyday emotional, political and ecological landscapes. Minter reaches with confidence and care into the furnace of experimental, modern and classical poetries and poetics. The result is the invention of a radically contemporary lyricism.
‘Minter’s work is among the most subtly textured lyric poetry presently being written in Australia, animated by flashes of visionary excess and precise, intelligent feeling.’ – Alison Croggon, poetryetc