Peter Bakowski



The Overview Effect: Nicola Williams Reviews Paul Munden and Peter Bakowski

In the music library at the Barbican Centre in London, the walls are lined with symphonies and sonatas, rigoletti and reference books for jazz and opera. Two men gossip about a composer. A man wearing headphones is silently learning the piano. His teacher, a woman with a grey bob, sits next to him at the electric keyboard and nods.

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Lunchtime Variations: Dominic Symes Interviews Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton

I became interested in how Ken and Peter worked with one another, with an eye to discovering the conditions which allow poetic collaborations to remain fresh and full of humour, in the same way people examine the diets of people in Blue Zones, like Okinawa and Ikaria.

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Portrait of Emma Palandra in the CBD, Melbourne, July 2018

Wearing a fake fur, her greying hair unwashed, a T2 bag at her feet, Emma sits in Self Preservation, hunched over her iPhone. She’s still thinking of phoning Eric now that the bruise below her left eye has faded. Eric …

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A Melbourne Letter Poem to Ken Bolton, January 2015

Dear Ken, I still frequent Self Preservation. Dan is there, dressed in black, always a book on the go. He’s just finished Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s “Death on the Instalment Plan” from which he quotes— “To hell with reality! I want to …

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Review Short: Peter Bakowski’s Personal Weather

Bakowski looks into the lens in the photograph by Nick Walton-Healey on the cover of Personal Weather. The poems are also direct. They eschew simile, ambiguity, and the abstract. Were he an etcher, Bakowski’s work would be figurative with clear outlines and orderly perspective. There is no hesitation in his lines. His skies might be cloudy but there would be no obscuring storms of angst, only fugitive rays spotlighting the quirky in the mundane.

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