Satyrs & Songs of an Upright Rabbit: Selected Poems

Deriving its title from Shakespeare's line in Henry IV, 'Away, you whoreson upright rabbit, away!', Jim Allen's selected poems are grouped under the following headings: Distant Lands, A Bestiary, The Breaking of Seals, Meditations, Lines of Resistance, Memories, A Company of Friends, Relationships, Comic Cuts, Tongues of Fire and Progression. As Jim Allen points out, poets are not saints - and many of these poems are pithy in the extreme. Professor Bruce Johnson writes in his 'Introduction': 'In matters of social justice he [Allen] has Blake's capacity for savage jabs of outrage, and I conclude that, like Swift, he can hate humankind but dearly love people. . . . Like his prose, these poems work most intensely for me when they are draped over the material world in which memory and emotion are invested.' The former Professor of English at the University of New South Wales concludes that some of Jim Allen's poetry is as fine as anything he has ever read. This is no slim volume, of verse, introduced by the colour-illustrated poem, Midnight Meditation, it contains 141 poems together with indexes of titles and first lines. Ranging between the expression of deep disgust to intense love, each poem makes its point without an excess of words.