Michael Brennan Biography
Michael Brennan, born in Sydney in 1973, is an Australian poet based in Tokyo.
His first volume of poetry, The Imageless World, won the Mary Gilmore Award. According to critic David McCooey, together with Unanimous Night it forms "the first parts of a triptych", and both books exhibit a "...complex and stylish interplay between opposing categories: light and dark; presence and absence; prose and poetry..." McCooey notes that "[t]he poetry is both brilliantly imagistic and pared back, both worldly and almost mystical in its concerns. In both books we find similar interests and motifs: hunger, darkness, eroticism, the earth and the sky..."
Brennan is the director of Vagabond Press, and the Australian editor of Poetry International Web. He is also an academic, and his doctoral thesis was entitled "The Impossible Gaze: Robert Adamson and the work of negativity."
The world was already the world
and we were looking for ourselves.
Like something mispronounced
we kept repeating our names,
...
The old man fumbles with his keys,
The waiter appears embarrassed.
‘I don’t want to talk about love any more,
...
Stained glass on a winter’s day. I read your diary backwards.
Tea hot in the cup, the sugarbowl empty and, yes, rain beginning to fall outside.
...
Don’t worry too much, it’s all taken care of.
That’s what the city tells you. You’re goo-goo about it,
fresh off the boat, looking to be the grit in its dozen oysters
...
It was days later. Not long after we left the convent
and the war stopped. I promised to take her
directly to the train station, but the sight of her
on the backseat scrambling out of that uniform,
...
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