Open Sesame

Michael Farrell is well known for his ability to break language and action into their component gestures, freeing the emotion locked up in them, and very often their comic or magical aspects too, as the title of his new poetry collection suggests. Open Sesame includes sonnets derived from the TV drama The Bill, a sestina featuring JFK set in a laundrette, an improvised parody which cuts up writing found on supermarket shelves, collage poems including one on Phar Lap, four long poems on the theme of friendship, and luke and henrys storyline, the story of a commitment ceremony between two gay men. In an earlier form, the manuscript of this collection won the inaugural Barrett Reid Poetry Prize for experimental poetry, and was praised by the judges for its playfulness, craft and subliminal force.