White Knight with Beebox: New and selected poems
John Leonard Press, $24.95 pb, 252 pp
‘Light as breath itself’
There are times when I read a book that reinvigorates important questions for me – such as how language carries and creates meaning, and what, after all, is the function and force of poetry. Usually, such a book is a creative work and I like to imagine that the first readers of volumes by George Herbert or John Donne responded with such questions – to poetry that consistently registered a persuasive complexity and which, while emotionally restrained, carried a pithy emotional charge.
Peter Steele’s White Knight with Beebox, published by one of Australia’s enterprising small independent publishers, the John Leonard Press, is a book of this kind. It collects most of the best of Steele’s poems, which are lyrical, questing and metaphysical.
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