Michael Brennan (poet)
Michael Brennan, born in Sydney in 1973, is an Australian poet based in Tokyo.[1]
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..." [2]
Brennan is the director of Vagabond Press, and the Australian editor of Poetry International Web. He is also an academic,[3] and his doctoral thesis was entitled "The Impossible Gaze: Robert Adamson and the work of negativity."[4]
Books
- The Imageless World, Salt, 2003
- Language Habits (chapbook), 2006
- Sky was sky (with Akiko Muto), 2007
- Atopia (with Kay Orchison)
- Unanimous Night, Salt, 2008
- Autoethnographic, Giramondo, 2012
As Editor
- Absence and Negativity in Australian Literature, 2000
- Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, 2000