Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Goodbye, Cruel
Author: SMITH MELINDA
Format: PAPERBACK
Imprint: PITT STREET POETRY
Price: $28.00
Publishing status: Active
Awarding Melinda Smith’s last poetry book the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literaray Award, the judges commented: ‘From its range of technique and tone to its depth of ideas, imagery and emotion, this collection announces the arrival of a major new poet.’ Goodbye, Cruel amply fulfills that confident prediction. Its five parts range from contemporary
life to the imagined adventures of Rabi’a Balkhi, is a semi-legendary Persian poet who lived over a thousand years ago. The sequence which gives the book its title is a profound meditation on the forbidding
subject of suicide.
‘Smith is a hard poet to categorise. She often displays a
mastery of traditional forms such as the sonnet. At other
times she can be almost an avant-gardiste with her use of
computer-generated poems and centos . . . She has a
seemingly innate feeling for irony and humour but can also
produce poems of extreme tenderness and emotional depth
when the subject demands them. Goodbye, Cruel displays all of these features and more.’
Geoff Page Sydney Review of Books
ISBN: 9781922080769