Peter Boyle

Ghostspeaking Peter Boyle

Eleven fictive poets from Latin America, France and Quebec. Their poems, interviews, biographies and letters weave images of diverse lives and poetics. In the tradition of Fernando Pessoa, Boyle presents an array of at times humorous, at times tormented heteronymous poets. In their varied voices and styles, writing as they do across the span of the 20th Century and into the 21st , these haunted and haunting figures offer one of poetry's oldest gifts - to sing beauty in the face of death. In all this Boyle, their fictive translator, is deeply enmeshed.

"As in his ground-breaking work, Apocrypha, Peter Boyle plays hauntingly and movingly with character and voice in this brilliant new collection. The often broken, dark-edged lives of his `translated' poets are rendered in language that is both intimate and universal. These poems and prose pieces span cultures and contexts to evoke an intoxicating range of human feeling and experience. Boyle's poetry confronts the dark, but it is also uplifting in its perfection of craft and for the way it radiates the enormous power that poetry has to uncover deep, surprising knowledge. I can think of no Australian poet more deserving of a central place on the world stage than Peter Boyle. His imaginative sweep is staggering." - Judith Beveridge


"Somewhere between a brief, succulent anthology of the best twentieth century poetry and a rare contemporary novel, Ghostspeaking rescues, from a world within this one, eleven poets who never existed. But that can never be said again. These lives and works are so convincing that readers will trawl the web to learn more about them. All of the writers gathered here are wonderful, some quite remarkable: what then does that leave us to say of the man who created them?" - David Brooks