Oil Slick Sun: haiku
by Peter Macrow

ISBN 0 9578436 7 4
published by Pardalote Press
125 x 180 mm, 64pp, colour cover, paperback, perfect bound
Price: $AU 18.50
available from http://www.pardalote.com.au

Peter’s poems have a soft resonance of resignation, a quiet recognition of the beauty of things past, and pointing to the aesthetics of death in a secularly spiritual way, which perhaps the ancient masters could only do through a Buddhist veil. Maria Flutsch, University of Tasmania
-
oil slick sun is a fascinating text, not afraid of “difficulty” but not seeming to indulge in it for its own sake. A fluid sense of time, place, individual and family generates complexes of meaning and feeling with which most readers will be able to empathise. Macrow’s use of a briefer line in his haiku than the traditional 5/7/5 syllable form, his ability to use the structure in a very accomplished and thorough way and to challenge and subvert orthodox beliefs about the process and purpose of haiku, makes for thought-provoking reading. Patricia Prime, Stylus