Neat Snakes

The beautiful are not exempt from the need to be brave. But we treat them as if they are: it is how we destroy them.

We find relief in sport precisely because it has no meaning: its drama is expressed in numbers, and numbers contain no moral burden.

Interiority withdraws the body from the moment like a first step towards sorrow.

Like many poets, Martin Langford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The neat snakes collected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way of articulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they nevertheless retain the poem's elegance, and its characteristic tension between emotion and idea. Neat Snakes is a very different addition to Australian writing.

Martin Langford has published seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are The Human Project: New and Selected Poems (P&W, 2009), and Ground (P&W, 2015). He is co-editor (with J. Beveridge, J. Johnson and D. Musgrave) of Contemporary Australian Poetry (P&W, 2016), and editor of Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788-2008 (P&W, 2009). An essayist and critic, he is the poetry reviewer for Meanjin. His work has been translated into French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish and Arabic.

"one of Australia's foremost poets. . . a truly visioniary poet" - Andy Kissane

"...equal to anything now being written in Australia" - Brian Purcell, Five Bells

"Langford does not resort to obscurity to keep a poem afloat; the juxtapositions and word plays are stunning adornments to clear communication... Ground is a major contribution to the continued development of an Australian postcolonial poetics." - Philip Hall, Verity La