Short Poems

Short Poems – Konrad Winkler’s debut poetry collection – gathers his clear-eyed miniatures of ordinary life – poems short enough to read in a breath and sharp enough to leave a mark.

Across roughly twenty poems, Winkler moves between the tender and the unflinching: a father’s fear of a rusted swing, a snail rescued from a footpath, a sparrow lost in a department store atrium, a wife’s hair against a pillow. Elsewhere the poems turn frankly toward the body and toward grief – a bout of influenza that ends in confusion and fear, three elegies for poets who took their own lives (Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan), and unguarded accounts of sex, ageing and loss that refuse polish in favour of honesty. Winkler’s is a poetry of the overlooked: compost bins as cities, weeds as the prettiest garden in the lane, a poisoned rat treated with the same gravity as human mourning. The tone shifts constantly – wry, tender, coarse, plainly stated – but the attention never does.

Praise for Konrad Winkler’s Short Poems

‘The poems are short. The book is small. But the gratitude for the humane, tender regard for all Konrad Winkler speaks of and for will inspire gratitude that is huge. It is now almost culturally and politically mandatory to celebrate what is humanly ordinary. As in all the forms of his art – Winkler does it with integrity and a sometimes-startling authenticity.’

— Raimond Gaita