This month, we’re celebrating two new releases from Gazebo Books’ poetry imprint, Life Before Man.

The first is Gary Catalano’s Collected Prose Poems, featuring the late Australian poet’s entire body of prose poetry in one volume for the first time.

Poetry editor Phil Day says: “I published two of Catalano’s books in my twenties (both by Finlay Press) and recently, when I went looking for his poetry, I found his books both difficult to source and out of print. They are just too good not to be in print, and I wanted to read them, so I published them.”

With the rise in popularity of the prose poem in recent years and more Australian poets turning their hand to the form, it is timely to introduce a new generation of readers to Catalano’s work, which remains unsurpassed in our literature.

The poems are also an excellent remedy for the sensory deprivation many of us may be experiencing in Covid isolation right now, says Phil, pointing to the opening line of The Spoon:

“As I glance down at the sink I notice the spoon standing in the cup, and suddenly I am back in the park on that late autumn day…”

Also out this month is an exciting new release from Melbourne-based poet and architect Alex Selenitsch. Purgatorio Re-placed is a brilliant re-write of Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book of his Divine Comedy.

In a year that marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, this ambitious work has been described as ‘a Dante for our times, as told through the looking glass of Australian history’.

While the original structure of the epic is maintained, it has been rewritten in modern Australian English and the medieval list of sins, characters and events are replaced with Australian ones.

Poet John Jenkins says Purgatorio Re-placed “couldn’t be more relevant to today’s environmentally degraded and post-bushfire Australia: certainly, its penetrating scrutiny, always tempered by a resonant note of hope, is well worth the wait!”

Hear Alex Selenitsch in conversation with Phil Day on our Author Talks podcas

Collected Prose Poems and Purgatorio Re-placed are now available in bookshops across Australia and New Zealand or buy them online here.