Stone Postcard

The title poem in Stone Postcard is a passionate drama that thinks through the close kinship of solace and trauma, something neither private nor public, and always waiting. The book as a whole moves with that spacious idea. The focus is intense, as you might expect. The tone, at the same time, is often laconic.

There are two Parts. The first, starting with a birth and fractured family, has an intimate scope; the second carries questions of belonging out to wider horizons. Paul Magee's variety takes in a policeman embracing an exploding man in Iraq, the international committee that met to recalibrate the metre in 1983, a keyhole view, a toddler at the beach, visits to an office of Employment Plus, and to New Jersey. Virgil's detailed, horrific account of war's chaos in the siege of Latium unfolds a nine-page climax to the book.

About the Author

Paul Magee is author of the eleven-chapter Cube Root of Book (John Leonard Press: 2006), and he is working on Chapter Twelve, again for John Leonard Press. He is also close to a final draft of a scholarly monograph on the meeting point between aesthetics and epistemology, entitled Poetry and Knowledge. His first book was the surrealist ethnography From Here to Tierra del Fuego (University of Illinois Press: 2000). Magee is a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council funded project Understanding Creative Excellence: a Case Study in Poetry, and he teaches poetry at the University of Canberra, where he is an Associate Professor. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, stagnation, boredom and revolution.