(A hundred mute gods, their eyes all put out, crowd together on a stone altar. Starved of blood. Lingering on in their hunger for one more sunset. A Sybil dozing lightly in an iron lung prophesies.)
It may be a day of lunar celebrations in Lhasa but kindly don’t treat me as a pretext for gnawing on ravens. Manage your own indigestion with diligence. Not every household fire needs more ghee.
Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. As a translator he has has published six books, including The Trees: Selected Poems by Eugenio Montejo (Salt 2004), José Kozer’s
Anima (Shearsman 2011), Marosa di Giorgio’s
Jasmine for Clementina Médici (Vagabond 2017) and
Poems of Olga Orozco, Marosa di Giorgio & Jorge Palma (Vagabond 2017). His translations of poems by Pierre Reverdy and René Char have appeared in the
American Poetry Review, Shadowtrain, Jubilat, Verse and
The Eco Anthology of International Poetry. In 2013 he was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literary Translation. He is also the author of seven books of poetry, including
Ghostspeaking, Towns in the Great Desert and
Apocrypha. His awards include the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Poetry (1995 & 2017), the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the Judith Wright Award.
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