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Poets post-1900
John Tranter with his Manchester Terrier “Tiger”, Sydney 2007, photo copyright © Susan Gordon-Brown
John Tranter (b.1943) was (like A.D. Hope) born in Cooma, New South Wales. He grew up on a farm on the NSW South Coast and took a BA in 1971. Since his first book, Parallax (1970), he has gone on to write more than twenty books of poetry and to compile four anthologies and collections of other writers’ work totalling over a thousand pages. He co-edited the popular Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1992), and is the founding editor of Jacket, set up in October 1997, which the UK Guardian described as ‘the prince of online poetry magazines.’ His 2006 new and selected volume Urban Myths was awarded the 2006 Victorian state award for poetry, the 2007 New South Wales state award for poetry, the 2008 South Australian state award for poetry, and the 2008 South Australian Premier’s Prize for the best book overall (which includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and others for the years 2006 and 2007).
John Tranter is married, with two adult children. He has travelled widely and now lives in Sydney where he is a company director and the founding publisher of this site.
A four-page biography of John Tranter
A PDF file of the book The Floor of Heaven, a collection of four loosely-linked narrative poems. This file is free to read in its entirety on this site, but it cannot be printed. Printed copies of this book can be purchased from the publisher’s website:
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=0975698001
or from the University of Queensland Bookshop mail order department: phone (617+) 3346 9434, fax (617+) 3365 1988 and email at
benc[ât]uqp.uq.edu.au
The book can also be purchased on the bookshop internet site:
http://www.bookshop.uq.edu.au/
‘A rattling good read’ — JOHN ASHBERY
‘The Floor of Heaven is a tour de force, a devious and profoundly subversive conjuring trick by a poet writing at the peak of his powers… the book pulses with a curious resonance… reminded me irresistibly of the best moments in Twin Peaks… a strange lyricism.’
— ANDREW RIEMER, Sydney Morning Herald
A PDF file of the book Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected. This file is free to read in its entirety on this site, but it cannot be printed. Printed copies of the book can be purchased from the publisher’s website:
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=0702235571
or from the University of Queensland Bookshop mail order department: phone (617+) 3346 9434, fax (617+) 3365 1988 and email at
benc[ât]uqp.uq.edu.au
The book can also be purchased on the bookshop internet site:
http://www.bookshop.uq.edu.au/
A PDF file of the book Crying in Early Infancy — 100 Sonnets, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1977. This file is free to read in its entirety on this site, but it cannot be printed. You can order a printed copy of the omnibus volume Trio, which contains this book, from Gleebooks in Australia: http://www.gleebooks.com.au/
or from the publisher, Salt Publishing, in Cambridge UK:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/
Trio is a 162-page omnibus collection of three books of poetry by John Tranter published over a period of wide-ranging stylistic experiment in the 1970s: Red Movie, his second book, published in 1972, Crying in Early Infancy, a collection of one hundred mainly free-verse sonnets (1977), and Dazed in the Ladies Lounge (1979).
A PDF file of the book The Blast Area, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1974. This file is free to read in its entirety on this site, and may be printed. The book is now out of print.
John Tranter’s first book Parallax (1970) may be read in its entirety on the University of Sydney Library SETIS site here:
A two-page interview with The Reader magazine, 2004, about the art and craft of poetry
John Tranter reviews New Devil, New Parish, poems by Alan Wearne; UQP Paperback Poets Second Series, $1.50 (paper). First published in The Australian, 11 June 1977.
John Tranter reviews Tactics, by Jennifer Maiden; Wild Honey, by Paul Kavanagh; Creekwater Journal, by Robert Gray: Paperback Poets Series 2, University of Queensland Press, $3.50 and $1.50 (paper). First published in The Australian 26 April 1975, Weekend page 6
John Tranter reviews Translations From The Albatross, poems by Robert Harris. This review was first published in The Australian in the late 1970s.
In the Survey Article section: ‘The Poetry Explosion’ — Virginia Osborne introduces six talented young Sydney poets, Vogue Australia, April 1971 (Robert Adamson, John Tranter, Michael Dransfield, Martin Johnston, Terry Larsen, and Peter Skrzynecki.)
Off-site:
John Tranter’s homepage at http://johntranter.com/ offers over 400 pages of poems, essays, interviews by and interviews with John Tranter, book reviews of his work and reviews by him of books by others, a biography (the same as above), a bibliography and dozens of photographs.
Off-site:
Early writing (1968–78) archived on Sydney University Library’s SETIS site at http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter-j-e/index.html — some 200 pages of material including two complete books, dozens of early reviews, a hoax magazine and a 1966 passport.
Off-site: Further poems and reviews and other texts by and about this author, or that mention this author’s name, can be found in Jacket magazine on the Internet: follow this link and type the author’s name into the Jacket Search engine.
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http://www.austlit.com/a/tranter-j-e/index.shtml