Bøger udgivet af Puncher & Wattmann

In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil - yet while Houdini is remembered to day for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini's flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?In Waypoints, his outlandish debut novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer's disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious - a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love.

From the award-winning author of Blood Universe - poems on pregnancy comes a full-length collection of new poetry: powerful, poignant meditations on family and its origins, parenthood, love and the loss of love. Includes poems shortlisted for the Montreal International and Bridport Prizes.One of the finest new voices in Australian poetry. Always clear and vivid, Esther's poetry is marked by its depth of insight, emotional honesty and attention to craft. We are repeatedly struck by the freshness of its imagery, its delicate attention to music and line, and phrasing which seems exactly right. Intimate, low-voiced delicate things is an extraordinary exploration of experiences most of us will recognise from our daily lives. - John FoulcherThe assurance of a tightrope walker centred in stillness high above the crowd. The all-important balance bar is weighted on one side with clarity and craft and on the other with an equal portion of emotional honesty. The effect is one of both recognition and enchantment. - Judy JohnsonPowerful, truthful and tender. - Danielle Wood

Sopping wet, this is a book pickled in sweat, salt water, and tears. The pages of handshake glitter and sparkle, crystalline and blue. They focus and unfocus on the sorrows, but also the sticky pleasures and absurd moments that constitute a lifetime. Albrecht's kaleidoscopic poems and photographs will shake your hand and leave it damp, like the salty lick of the ocean. - Anupama PilbrowAlbrecht's tautly composed intermedial work holds open breathing room for our climate's changing atmosphere, which blows through, shaking the camera, blurring lines, breaking borders, to map an (eco)poetics of separation-in-connection, the only pulse that counts. Taken on their own, the poems feel utterly contemporary, while taken in concert and in tension with the digitally manipulated photography, they carve out an aesthetic space ahead of their time. - Jonathan SkinnerClaire Albrecht's handshake tilts, precariously and joyously, between a series of poems and photographs, text and empty space, its gaps and transitions becoming places to breathe, to pause amid today's turmoil of crises and anxieties. The poems and photographs don't explain each other, yet there's something compelling and uncanny in the way they interrupt and unsettle, as they gesture past the immediate to something larger. At the same time, the book's poems are fully grounded: sweaty, salty, fleshy, smoky, and naked (a lot), alternately provoking and playful, cheeky and sincere, uninhibited and seriously articulate. handshake is the real deal: irresistible, disarmingly candid, highly charged, genuinely exciting. - Jill Jones

The fragrances of autobiography are suspicion and make-believe.Biography is death.-Alex QuelWith a Foreword: Introducing The Poetry (And Brief Life) Of Alex Quel, by Peter Boyle and MTC Cronin

In her memoir, Ask No Questions, Eva Collins charts her family's journey from Poland to Australia during the Cold War. Her restrained tone reflects the threat her parents experienced of the Communist regime and of ubiquitous anti-Semitism. Simply written and deeply moving she captures loss and gain, grief and celebration with great poignancy. With a third of Australians born overseas and half the population with one migrant parent, Ask No Questions forms a crucial part of our national experience. Its accessible poetry is particularly suited for young adult readers.

Robert Gray was born in 1945 on the north coast of New South Wales and has worked as a book buyer, journalist, advertising copywriter and mail-sorter. He was an early recipient of Australia Council grants, enabling him to travel in China, Japan, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. He has written eight books of poetry and a prize-winning memoir.Robert received the first Patrick White award, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and an Emeritus award from the Australia Council.He lives in Sydney with his partner Dee Jones.

Has there been an Australian poet as troubadorish and piratical as Duncan Hose? The work is a response to an imaginary Auden's (or someone's) pronouncement that poetry be playful or drunken speech, linguistically badly behaved - more sweet-sounding than anything I can think of in Australian English. - Michael FarrellBorn in Van Diemen's Land, Duncan Hose is the author of Rathaus, One Under Bacchus and Bunratty. A shillelagh is a blackthorn club used variously as a walking stick, a companion, and a weapon. A Jewelled Shillelagh is what you have in your hands.

Australia needs to appreciate its poets - what they think, how they work, how they conceive of creativity, and the extent to which their work offers important insights into the human condition. This volume offers a pathway to such an understanding. It presents a collection of fascinating, candid and diverse interviews with ten of Australia's most distinguished poets, each interview crammed with eloquent insights and quirky observations, and homing in on different ways to approach creative activity. I recomment it to everyone with an interest in Australian writing and culture, and to lovers of poetry everywhere. - Paul Hetherington

In Sheet Music, John Upton's second collection of poetry, his meditations on people and places are at the same time moving and personal, and sweepingly international. These poems travel: they make pit-stops in both strange and familiar territory, they linger at destinations. They take you on a wild ride through a range of deftly-handled poetic forms, and always they touch down on the human heart.Upton has a gift for dark humour, understated irony and incisive imagery, and his vision ranges from the impact of broken relationships and our connection with other sentient creatures, to the futility of war and empty patriotism. Through often unexpected analogies and startling imagery, his poems probe the nature and progress of grief and illness, and the ways the body, and the body politic, can betray the self. At times colloquial and irreverent, or formal and imagistic, they affirm the radiance that can be found all around and within us, despite the provisionality and chaos of existence."In Embracing the Razor, Upton handles an impressive range of forms, from free verse to couplets and more intricate rhyming structures... The poems of grief and adjustment are poignant and often darkly humorous... Upton's work is compelling and will prove deservedly popular." - Aidan Coleman, The Australian"Embracing the Razor displays many of the same skills and talents that have informed John Upton's playwriting career... Emotion is hidden beneath precise description, but pushes itself to the fore through juxtaposed images and recollections, with the kind of volte-face and summary last line we will learn to expect from this poet." - Margaret Bradstock, Southerly"Though the first section may be the most moving, the second is the most acute. Upton has a mordant eye for society's contradictions... In the face of such skill, it's difficult to remember that Embracing the Razor is actually Upton's debut collection." - Geoff Page, Australian Book ReviewJohn Upton was a professional dramatist for 27 years. He was scriptwriter for more than twenty Australian television series, and had five stage plays produced over his career as a writer. His political comedy Machiavelli, Machiavelli won the Australian Writers Guild's award for Best New Play in 1985. John's first poetry collection is Embracing the Razor (2014).