Title: Wildlife of Berlin /
Authors: Neilsen, Philip, 1949-
Year: 2018
Subjects: Australian poetry
Abstract: "Neilsen's intelligent, searching, and relentlessly contemporary poems in Wildlife of Berlin reveal a poet whose chief interest is transforming and challenging the way we see our human position in a world under ecological and ideological threat. At once philosophical and conversational, deadly serious and unerringly wry, these poems offer us forensically clear-eyed perspectives on subjects ranging from environmental degradation and the impending collapse of fragile ecosystems in the anthropocene, to unconventional and irreverent portraits of figures drawn from literature and politics and beyond. Neilsen's poems are miraculously both deeply ethical and deeply comic; they surprise and delight with the irreverence of their critiques, while always keeping an eye on the tragic consequences of human folly. Above all, they ask us to sit still, to pay attention, to re-examine our basic precepts with equal measures of reason, wit, imagination and empathy. Wildlife of Berlin is a superbly crafted, incisive and urgent collection of new work from one of Australia's most original poets, and deserving of the wide audience I am sure it will find. These are necessary poems for incendiary times."--Sarah Holland-Batt
Contents: Machine generated contents note: Marienplatz -- Munich -- Wildlife of Berlin -- Hotel Paris -- Cane Toad -- Americans are Shooting Elephants -- Anna Karenina -- Lady Chatterley -- Sleeping Beauty -- Literary Walking -- Thanotophobia -- Profound Hypothermia -- For Nearly Four Decades He Was Summer -- Suicide -- The Healers -- Crow -- Snowy Owl -- Auspices -- Butcherbird -- Tawny Frogmouth -- Pied Currawong -- Rainbow Lorikeets -- Mt Tamborine -- Magpie -- Noisy Miner -- Superb Fairy Wren -- The Eastern Whipbird -- The New Holland Honeyeater -- Red-capped Robin -- Long Pocket, Indooroopilly -- A University Bureaucrat Plans a Garden -- A Philosopher in the Brothel -- The Scientist at his Mother's Grave -- A Lawyer at the Funeral -- Unity Valkyrie Mitford at the Osteria -- Arthur's Seat -- Edinburgh -- Philip Roth at 11.00 am -- The University Makes a Poem -- The Humour of Elvis -- The Erl-King Reconsiders His Purpose -- Guitar -- Noosa Beach -- The Girl in the Sky