Corey Wakeling

Acclaimed poet Corey Wakeling’s second collection continues his inquiry into language and the spatial architectures of history and culture. Set among 20^th century ruins, the poems are cast as if hallucinations: colonial-style houses are ‘guarded by palm trees’, Royal Park ‘detains two immoveable statues’ while the ‘Wheel of Fortune dizzies’. The poems range throughout Melbourne and Western Australia, where the poet has lived, and further afield too. Strong in its deployment of baroque imagery and modernist citation, The Alarming Conservatory uniquely captures the fear and pace of our contemporary condition.

Goad Omen is Wakeling’s first full-length collection of poems, a vibrant and witty interplay of depths and resurfacings, portraying a world littered with grim foreshadowings and kitschy memorabilia alike. Traversing fable and found object, hearsay and gainsay, intrigue and abstraction, its personas are immersed in natural and urban ‘landscapes of peril’ – whether in Melbourne, Glasgow, Rottnest Island or Japan. His poetry has strong sense of community, and converses with a wide range of poets and writers, while at the same time being keenly aware of the absurd and the extreme. Fuelled by a mad energy, his ‘omens’ are calamitous, intoxicating, ribald, but always tender and surprising at their core.