Studio Moon

The poems in Studio Moon were written over the last fifteen years, and cover a wide range of styles and approaches: poems that are answers to other poets' work, sometimes wrenched out of context (a version of Schiller's `A Maiden from Afar', for example, is set in a hamburger joint in Los Angeles), borrowings from Matthew Arnold and Barbara Guest, an ode, a three-page poem in sapphic stanzas, a computer-based pastiche, two deeply-felt elegies, two sestinas, four haibun, eight pantoums, and dozens of others, all imbued with Tranter's trademark blend of wit, style and feeling.


John Tranter is an important writer in mid-career. He has published twenty-one books - four collections of work by others totalling over a thousand pages, and seventeen collections of his own writing, including Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh, 1998), Different Hands, a group of seven fiction pieces (Salt Publications, Cambridge, 1998), The Floor of Heaven, a book-length sequence of four interlinked verse narratives (Arc, UK, 2001), Heart Print (Salt Publications, Cambridge, 2001) and Borrowed Voices (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2002).


He compiled and edited (with Philip Mead) the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. He is the publisher and editor of the much talked about literary quarterly Jacket, at jacketmagazine.com, which has received more than a third of a million visits from readers around the world.