Mishaps and Other Poems

The poems presented in Mishaps are highly varied, impressivelyexperimental, sensitive and reflective across an astonishingly broad range ofexperience, and deeply moving in the richness of their humanity. Through each of them, resonates Bill?svision of poetry as a special annunciation and of the poet as seer, asspokesperson, recorder, analyst, adjudicator and above all, as the reminder toeach of us of the best that is so easily lost to the deathly universe of habitand blunted perception, to both the deadening routines of daily life anddomestic regimes and to the crueller hand of oppression, authoritarianism, andmisused authority in all its forms, from the primitive imposition of willthrough brute power political gangsterism, corruption and ?state-orchestratedperjury?, as he calls it in ?Sights Along Abakwa Ring Road?, through to theoften less identifiable and far more insidious regimes of internationalfinance, World Bank, ?Black Debt?, and the hidden swindlings of theinternational monetary system. A collectionfull of richness and diversity everyone should read in its entirety. Michael Meehan (Writer & Critic, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)