AustLit

'Starting At Basheer’s represents in part a determined ‘tightening up’ of the language and sentiment brought to the author’s work. In this book the author responds to growing tensions and growing animosities felt in Australian society: bleakly reductivist withdrawals of sympathy, and of automatic goodwill, are tested, examined and worked around. The poems have unusual virtues in this respect: a kind of ‘realism’ in dealing with ideas, an exciting openness to the social world and the extension of an empathy that seems genuine because hard won. Even the most serious of these poems seems open, too, to playfulness & aesthetic opportunism—jokes, rapid shifts of direction and attention, allusions to popular culture and to literature and the visual arts.

'Starting At Basheer’s is continuous with Ken Bolton’s work in its themes and areas of interest—characterized by the poems’ resolve to think through experiences, issues, social, ethical and aesthetic problems, using the lens of the everyday. At the same time the poems refuse to preclude any one register—high, low, or middling, the casual and the seriously proposed, the specialist and the amateur. At all times the ‘Self’, the ‘citizen, is weighed and judged in the light of the imagined Other.' (Publication summary)