Awake at the Wheel

Awake at the Wheel
ISBN: 9781922181916
Publication Date: 1 August 2016

From the backroads of the Australian outback to the icy streets of Paris winter, these dynamic and original poems traverse geographies, languages and techniques. Marked by a subtle probing of the metaphysical layerings that underpin human experience, this exploration returns us again and again to the concrete details of everyday happenings. Drawing equally on moments of joy and loss, shifting from comic and bawdy bohemianism to introspective sensory envelopment, Awake at the Wheel evokes for us a dynamic and fragile world.

This fragility is an insistent theme, both in terms of human mortality and ecological crisis. In our travels we are transported across a beautiful earth, through mental and spiritual zones bleached by consumer capitalism, and through country ravaged by mining. We pass amongst the ghosts of those who have gone before, the spirits of our loved ones, and of our cultural and literary inheritances. This is a collection of playful, innovative and imaginative poems, driven by a refined and attentive musicality, brimming with possibility and surprise.

About the Author

Berndt Sellheim is a poet and academic. He has a doctorate in phenomenology, and his work has been published in periodicals and collections such as Meanjin, Heat, Liminal Pleasures, Overland, Best Australian Poems, Cutwater, Eyeline Contemporary Arts Journal and The Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology. Berndt lives in Sydney's Blue Mountains with his wife, the author Tara Moss, and their daughter. His first novel, Beyond The Frame's Edge, was published with Fourth Estate in May 2013.