AustLit logo

AustLit

image of person or book cover 6794829800785503154.jpg
Cover image courtesy of publisher.
y separately published work icon Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness selected work   poetry  
  • Author:agent Peter Boyle http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/boyle-peter
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness represents a new departure in my writing. It is a single book-length poem made up of fragments and shorter pieces in varied styles that build towards the last line, which is the book's title. I have aimed at a sparse, open simplicity in this book, a clarity and brevity sufficient to carry the weight of the space I am now in, with my illnesses, my partner's cancer and the acute sense of time's limits. The poems question what it might mean to live and write in the immediate knowledge of death, what response we can find when out of the blue we, or the one we love, are told we have a very limited time, three or five years, to live. At the artistic as well as the personal level, there is also a need for balance in the work, as beauty, tenderness, the presence of the natural world, light as well as dark, insist on their place in the poem.'

Source: Author's blurb.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Vagabond Press , 2019 .
      image of person or book cover 6794829800785503154.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 80p.p.
      ISBN: 9781925735048

Works about this Work

Between Night and Night Bonny Cassidy , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry

'Death’s intrusion upon love is an old complaint. Philosophically, in Western Europe, it may have emerged as a problem in response to ideas of human limitation in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. This was early materialist thinking intended to prepare the late Roman mind for the finitude of life, belief, control and pleasure. The poetry of death-in-love is another matter. It is characterised by rage, disbelief and helplessness. It is ancient and myriad.' (Introduction)

Fragments of Power Sarah Holland-Batt , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23 May 2020; (p. 18)

'While it was TS Eliot who famously described poetry as “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”, it was the great Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who achieved this escape most fully.' (Introduction)

David McCooey Reviews Three New Poetry Collections David McCooey , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 420 2020;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry ; The Lowlands of Moyne Brendan Ryan , 2019 selected work poetry ; Carte Blanche Thom Sullivan , 2019 selected work poetry
Peter Boyle : Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Martin Duwell , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 14 2019;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry

'This remarkable book is a kind of livre composé covering the twenty months which begin with the author’s discovery that his partner is suffering from an incurable disease. One’s initial response is that this will provide a difficult test not only for the author himself, but also for the Romance-influenced, surreal (to use a loose term loosely) poetic mode that Peter Boyle has pioneered throughout his career and which I have written about at some length on this site in reviews of his other work. Sometimes the background landscapes of his poems, though fictional, anchor them in at least the illusion of a solid reality: Apocrypha was, for example, an anthology of different kinds of poetry produced by different cultures in an imagined alternative world; Ghostpeaking was an anthology of poems produced by imaginary Romance language speakers whose biographies were provided – also anchoring the poems in some way. Here, the pain that anchors the poems is oppressively realistic and one feels, initially, that it might be difficult for readers to respond to conceptually elegant poems of dreams and dream images which are tied to a painful experience which they have either experienced themselves or can relate empathically to.' (Introduction)

Peter Boyle : Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Martin Duwell , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 14 2019;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry

'This remarkable book is a kind of livre composé covering the twenty months which begin with the author’s discovery that his partner is suffering from an incurable disease. One’s initial response is that this will provide a difficult test not only for the author himself, but also for the Romance-influenced, surreal (to use a loose term loosely) poetic mode that Peter Boyle has pioneered throughout his career and which I have written about at some length on this site in reviews of his other work. Sometimes the background landscapes of his poems, though fictional, anchor them in at least the illusion of a solid reality: Apocrypha was, for example, an anthology of different kinds of poetry produced by different cultures in an imagined alternative world; Ghostpeaking was an anthology of poems produced by imaginary Romance language speakers whose biographies were provided – also anchoring the poems in some way. Here, the pain that anchors the poems is oppressively realistic and one feels, initially, that it might be difficult for readers to respond to conceptually elegant poems of dreams and dream images which are tied to a painful experience which they have either experienced themselves or can relate empathically to.' (Introduction)

David McCooey Reviews Three New Poetry Collections David McCooey , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 420 2020;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry ; The Lowlands of Moyne Brendan Ryan , 2019 selected work poetry ; Carte Blanche Thom Sullivan , 2019 selected work poetry
Between Night and Night Bonny Cassidy , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry

'Death’s intrusion upon love is an old complaint. Philosophically, in Western Europe, it may have emerged as a problem in response to ideas of human limitation in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. This was early materialist thinking intended to prepare the late Roman mind for the finitude of life, belief, control and pleasure. The poetry of death-in-love is another matter. It is characterised by rage, disbelief and helplessness. It is ancient and myriad.' (Introduction)

Fragments of Power Sarah Holland-Batt , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23 May 2020; (p. 18)

'While it was TS Eliot who famously described poetry as “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”, it was the great Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who achieved this escape most fully.' (Introduction)

Last amended 5 Aug 2020 15:15:15
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X