The Whispering Gallery

Book excerpt: Apart from his Personal Chair in English at the University of Melbourne, Peter Steele has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Alberta, Georgetown, Washington and Loyola, Chicago. An esteemed Australian poet, he is intensely interested in the process whereby literary works are produced by contemplating masterpieces of painting or sculpture. Outstanding poets, from Homer to Auden, have followed this tradition. The fifty-two poems in this book have been inspired by artworks Peter Steele has admired during his world travels. The renowned Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has written of Steele's book: 'It is a work of great drive, shine and abundance, at once liberated and intense, a combination of intellectual rigour and imaginative spree. It deepens and widens the course of Peter Steele's own poetry, and since it presents the pictures that inspired the poems, it will invite readers to a new and complex experience.'