Tranter’s restless craft is evident in the service of a complex and free-ranging style in this brilliantly playful collection.
Poor Doris, she was like an uprooted tree
swirling through the eye of a tornado, one viewer feels,
an aquatic Dorothy Gale in a gale. Then
she married again and again, but America
is sleeping safely with its secrets in the Western night.
'Starlight gives us all the more reason to celebrate this most energetic and literate of voices.' Bookseller Publisher September 2010
'Tranter reveals himself yet again as a master of popular culture, an adept guide who can be inside a movie while running a commentary on it from the outside. Starlight: 150 Poems is a generous selection. Tranter has taken many risks in this new book and a satisfying number of them have paid off handsomely in ways which, for all their supposed dependence on other poets, are uniquely his own.'Canberra Times, August 2010
'Tranter’s work is imbued with the personality we know from his poems, flaying romanticism and contemporary society, and able to make any situation absurdist.' Australian Book Review, September 2010
'Starlight starts slowly but gets better and better as it goes along and in the last two parts it really glitters.' Sydney Morning Herald, December 2010
‘A book of “mistranslations”, reworkings and great wit.’ Saturday Age
