Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949 and lives in Brisbane. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry in Australia, including the remarkable volume "The Ash Range" (1987), which won the Victorian Premier's New Writing Award, and also a volume of cultural history "Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901-1939" (2001). This book is Duggan's first collection to be published in Britain and the USA, and is a career overview which introduces a vibrant and colourful new voice which will sound familiar at first - with its obvious influences from the New York School - but will then sound stranger, as a distinctive Australian element emerges, an element moreover that communicates well across borders. Shearsman Books publishes a new edition of "The Ash Range" simultaneously with this volume.