Prickly Moses

Compelling poems that celebrate language as it encounters the nameless variety of the natural world, from Australia to Italy

An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking. West’s intensely regional focus stands in dialogue with Europe and antiquity. Landscapes reveal the tangle of their historical dimensions, as the rivers of both the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia and the Po Valley in northern Italy merge and flow into the wider currents of the Southern Ocean. Again and again, language and the senses throw themselves into the nameless riot of the world, from eucalypts and clouds to a medieval bell tower and the sounds a pencil makes as it crosses a page.

"West finds inspiration for his gorgeously detailed poems in the figures and likenesses of nature: a eucalyptus twists ‘like wrist joints in an artist’s portfolio,’ new growth catches ‘the light like a crowd / of scimitars in the breeze.’ The Australian poet’s formally engaged, often rhyming verse—sonnets, couplets—reveals a mind nurtured in a Mediterranean climate of classicism."---David Woo, Literary Hub

“Words, in Simon West’s poems, are so lovingly proffered in all their materiality that we rejoice in the further revelations of meaning and import. All poetry is local, and West situates us in locales that are rich in resonance—whether Australia or Italy or some region of the mind where we become part of a wider world.”—Paul Kane, author of A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina