In
Sly Mongoose
the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an 'ordinary punter', a beaver, a worried mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John Forbes. So there you go.
'Nobody in Australia is writing quite like Ken Bolton ... working a relativist's sceptical, provisional territory ... (a) thinking against thought.'
- J.S. Harry
'A rare instance of contemporary Australian poetry in the mode of literary and cultural criticism.'
- David McCooey A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smeared, grinning cheerfully at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type,
El Cid
. Born in Sydney in 1949 he works at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide and edits Little Esther books. Bolton has published a good deal of art criticism, some of it collected in
Art Writing
(Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia). He edited
Homage To John Forbes
and wrote the monograph
Michelle Nikou
. He edited the magazines
Magic Sam
and
Otis Rush
and has published numerous books of poetry. Wakefield Press published
The Circus
in 2010 and Vagabond Press
A Whistled Bit Of Bop
. Earlier titles include
At The Flash And At The Baci
Untimely Meditations
.