Alex Skovron

Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies.
From the early 1970s he worked as a book editor for various publishers in Sydney and Melbourne, and was general editor of The Concise Encyclopaedia of Australia (1979); he now lives in Melbourne with his wife Ruth and their two children Marissa and Jonathan, and works as a freelance editor.

Skovron's poetry has been published widely and three collections have appeared to date:

He has been a winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry (1983), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (1995 and 2001), the Manuel Gelman Memorial Prize for Literature (1997), and the Kyneton Literature Festival Poetry Prize (2002).
His published work includes short stories, and he has completed a novella.
A fourth book of poems, The Man and the Map, will be released in 2003.

The Rearrangement

First published 1988 by Melbourne University Press
Reprinted 1996 by Octave (paperback, 112 pp., $14.95).
Available through Jewish Australia Online

Alex Skovron's first collection of poetry presents a diverse poetic landscape in which some of the major preoccupations of our time are explored. Central to these is the journey towards self-knowledge. It is a journey that moves through the discovery, questioning, perhaps even judgment, of history's lessons, both personal and collective; through relationships, observed, intimate and estranged; through music, art and the creative impulse; through faith. The Old World, with its complex legacy, is a recurring concern.

Each of the three sections opens and concludes with a longer poem. Within and across the sections, themes overlap and echo, contend and mesh. By means of this framework, epitomized in the structure of the title poem, the circle of experience is drawn together. But the circle is never closed; like the pattern in the glass of a kaleidoscope, it remains restless, open, and ready always to rearrange itself into new patterns and possibilities.

"... the individuality of Skovron's voice is remarkable and disconcerting.
Poems like these amount not so much to an extension of our poetic traditions
as a rearrangement of them."
(Philip Mead, Age)

"... a poet of great resourcefulness and erudition, one who brings to Australian poetry an originally European sensibility together with an impressive panache in the music he is able to make from English vowels and consonants."
(Alan Gould, Canberra Times)

"I have now read The Rearrangement many times and the riches it has to offer seem to me inexhaustible... It can be strongly recommended to all readers of poetry, as well as to general readers who do not care for poetry, as a rule, but who like to have their intellect led on into fresh pastures and other lives."
(Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Australian Jewish News)

Sleeve Notes

Published 1992 by Hale & Iremonger in association with Golvan Arts (paperback, 88 pp., $12.95).
Available through Jewish Australia Online

This highly orchestrated collection - in both the thematic and the musical sense - features three longer poems: the symphonic meditation 'Quadrilateral', the autobiographical sonnet sequence 'The Waterline Poems', and the twelve-part title suite inspired by the life and music of Mozart. These and the thirty-three other poems that make up the book offer a rich poetic journey - a journey that takes in Berlin and Beijing, Dublin and old Venice, Vietnam, Uluru and the Garden of Eden; a journey where Sisyphus and Nietzsche rub shoulders with Eliot and Hopkins, where Elgar and Mahler encounter Karl Marx and Clark Kent. We come across photographers and fools, flying-boats and fledgling poets, apples, chess games, grammarians, circuses and sleep; there are ants, moths and spiders, flowers and faces - the imagined, the actual and the surreal. And there are the shores of childhood, with their magic, their promise, and their song …

"Those who have not previously read this scrupulous and inventive poet will now have to do so, and those who already admire his work will find new depths and lustres in these fresh explorations into life, art, and the surprising exchanges to which they are subject ... Skovron's poetic voice - formal without undue formality, serious yet always open to wit and humour - has been recognized from the start as clear and companionable. With Sleeve Notes it becomes authoritative."
(Kevin Hart)

"Like the Roman god of doorways, Alex Skovron's poetry faces both ways, towards both the past and the future. His conservative, discursive self is a courtly presence, like that of a highly civilized tutor to a princely house of the Enlightenment ... But under his radical aspect Skovron is a restless scientist of language, an inventor of beautiful new taxonomies and even a psychologist of violent impulses."
(Chris Wallace-Crabbe)

"The attentive may feel that some obscure plan is being played out around them (as indeed we know it is, in the more ambitious poems …). While a lot of the work stays covered, one begins to trust it because of its manifest care."
(Les Harrop)

"There is a roundedness, a variety, to Skovron's poetry that makes it both accessible and yet challenging … These are lucid and frequently moving poems, their language the controlled result of the often difficult marriage of passion and intellect."
(Shane McCauley)

Infinite City

Published 1999 by Five Islands Press (paperback, 118 pp., $13.95).
Reprinted 1999.
Available through Jewish Australia Online.

Infinite City is a collection of 100 poems in a ten-line form for which Alex Skovron has coined the name 'sonnetina'. These sonnetinas speak in many voices, though certain motifs recur and intersect. Rhythm and colour shift from page to page; rhyme-schemes vary, or vanish; fact and invention jostle each other as the form is explored from many angles.

The poems reflect upon time and destiny, on culture, language, sex, music and art, on the sacred and the mundane. They investigate terrains both social and inner, probing our daily confrontations with the self. The relation between thought, language, symbol and meaning is a central concern.

Although each sonnetina is self-contained, the book can be read as an unfolding journey through the realms and layers of experience. It can also be entered obliquely, along paths that subvert the printed sequence but uncover unexpected echoes and links; or dipped into at random, with individual poems rotated under the light.

"This book is remarkable in two respects: its high standard of craft, and its strong and flexible intellectual quality … The overall effect is of a fluid whole which is impressively large in its reach, both in tone and in thought."
(John Leonard)

"Reading the poems singly, in their complete sequence or in their thematically-arranged groupings, the reader is rewarded by their extraordinary range of intellectual rigour, emotional experience and subject matter, as well as the satisfaction of encountering extremely accomplished poetry."
(Marcelle Freiman, Australian Jewish News)

"Structurally, these are flawless poems: economical, and beautifully put together …
[They are] almost like modern-day psalms."
(Paola Bilbrough, Heat)

"… Infinite City is an impressive and masterly book."
(Peter Boyle, Cordite)

Alex Skovron's books may be ordered through Jewish Australia Online