P'rea Press

P’rea Press is extremely proud to announce the launch of Avatars of Wizardry: Poetry Inspired by George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry” and Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Hashish-Eater.” This work, the product of over 108 years of intense poetic beauty and strangeness, brings to fruition a unique anthology and sequence of long imaginative poems, narcotic in their essence and vistas, and red-coloured in their fever pitch. It is the very first time these two tremendous American poets have been published in Australia. It is also one of the few rare times their Titan twin towers of song have been published together in the same book. This is a twofold cause for great celebration!

And yet there are nine further reasons to celebrate. They are joined by a stellar crew of modern poetic masters of the uncanny in the form of: SFPA Grand Master Bruce Boston, Grand Master nominated Richard L. Tierney, Alan Gullette, Michael Fantina, Wade German, Australians Leigh Blackmore, Earl Livings, Kyla Lee Ward, and S. T. Joshi, who provides a brilliant Foreword. The new, featured book, published November 2012, is made available in paperback and ebook from the publisher, and bookstores and ebookstores around the world. May the prophecy of Avatars evolve your stepping-stones to light!

Arguably the most profound and enduring landscape associated with Australian Bush Poetry is that of the outback, and in no way is that better articulated than the annual ‘Poets Trek’ in Bourke. Every year, poetry lovers, intrepid travellers and lovers of Australian culture congregate in Bourke, NSW to join the two day trek which explores outback landscapes, and reconnects them (and us) with the poetry inspired by them.

The route is that taken by Henry Lawson on his famous 125 mile (200km) walk in 1891 in the middle of burning summer from Bourke to Hungerford on the Queensland border. It meanders through unpaved back roads once ridden by Breaker Morant, Will Ogilvie and bushranger Midnight.

The landscape is redolent of harsh and fearful stories which the early swagmen captured in poetry, song and prose. Within this literature is a strong vein of the supernatural – of events beyond reality, ghosts, miraculous survival and even the mythical creature known as the bunyip.

P’rea Press researches classical Australian fantasy poetry, including Bush Poetry and so in September 2012 we drove from Sydney to Bourke (500 miles/800km) to be part of the Poets Trek. We stood in dry lakes and river beds, deserted woolsheds, old pubs and near lonely isolated graves that inspired poems over a century ago, and trekkers read aloud those very poems.     

For an authentic, deeply satisfying literary adventure in September each year, contact the Back O Bourke Centre http://www.backobourke.com.au/