Short Poems

Short Poems – Alan Fyfe’s second title with Gazebo Books’ Life Before Man imprint, following his debut collection G-d, Sleep, and Chaos (2024) – gathers twenty-two poems set largely in and around Fyfe’s home ground of Mandurah and the Peel region south of Perth.

The poems move between blunt, plainspoken narrative (a stranger pissing on a rug after a bender, a feral cat’s last snarl at death, a friend’s slow walk toward suicide) and stranger, more speculative registers – a villanelle for a post-apocalyptic flood, a prose poem imagining a world that has forgotten how art works and reveres a rotating ‘lump’ instead. Grief recurs throughout: for a cat, an old friend, a marriage, a warming planet. So does Fyfe’s dry, often profane humour and his interest in Jewish liturgical and philosophical form (the villanelle, the psalm, the manifesto).

Praise for Alan Fyfe’s Short Poems

‘Herein we have Alan Fyfe at his localist, deadly-witted best. This is a short book with massive impetus. Brushing aside any false respect for convention, these poems scintillate, burn and scythe with a strangely particular sense of physical immediacy saturated with a conceptual distance. Blurring conversational casualness with prosodic acuity makes the sharp stuff seem to cut just a little less while also dazzling with self-awareness and self-critique. All of this with a sensitivity to the ‘ordinary’ that builds pictures of place. What more needs to be said, beyond the reality that TS Eliot was just ‘another fascist who loved animals’?’

— John Kinsella