Joao

New collection from award-winning poet John Mateer

In a sequence of 64 sonnets, John Mateerdescribes the encounters of an alter-ego, Joo, as he travels across the globe,attending festivals and readings, meeting with friends, lovers, and often-famousfellow authors. Questioning identity, melancholy in disposition, troubledby dreams and memories, Joo is also an innocent, and given to moments ofillumination and joy. 

Mateer is both ironic and affectionate in his treatmentof this picaresque figure, creating through his sonnet sequence a narrativewhich is new in Australian writing, the worldwide adventures of the poet as anti-hero, one who, despite his disappointments, still believes in the power of literatureto create a sense of belonging, and to invoke 'the deep mandala of meeting andfriendship'. 

'JohnMateer is a poet with a peripatetic sense of self who is fascinated bycross-cultural historical currents and transformations...his poems frequentlyregister how history and its associated human ambitions and cruelties taint orinflect much that we know.' - SydneyReview of Books