Paper Bark Press
Empty Texas
1999, 80 pages, softcover, 215x150mm
ISBN 90 5704 036 0
Cover photograph: 'Rdurraki and Karrku, Tanami Desert' by Jon Rhodes
Empty Texas is the second volume by a young Australian poet, Peter Minter. Empty Texas follows the success of Minter's first volume, Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin, which in 1996 made the author the youngest ever poet to be shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry.
Empty Texas represents a maturing and broadening of the scope and vision of one of Australia's most exciting new voices. Engaging with contemporary trends in both national and international poetics, Empty Texas explores the ecologies of human and natural landscapes, scrutinises relations between language, sensuality and cognition, and articulates a view of life and death which is utterly honest and uncompromising.
'Peter Minter's Empty Texas is alert, ironic and romantic simultaneously. While many poets bask in their influences, Minter's influences are the equipment he uses to discover what doesn't exist yet, that is, to make new.'
~ Gig Ryan, Judge's Report for awarding Empty Texas the 2000 Age Poetry Book of the Year
'Genuinely exhilarating, assured and truly seductive, with a control of mood and precision of vocabulary and lineation that are truly winning. Peter Minter's poems unlock the fission of language.'
~ Philip Mead, Australian Book Review
'Without doubt, Minter's innovations place him in the advance guard of a new vision of Australian poetry.'
~ Louis Armand, Meanjin
'Peter Minter is something of a virtuoso.'
~ Peter Craven, The Age
'What is remarkable about the prologue, and about all of the more successful poems in the book, is the economy of means through which Minter manages the transformation from initial "dry end" to conclusive, unillusioned, poetic and visionary possibility.'
~ The Times Literary Supplement
Empty Texas won the 2000 Age Book of the Year prize for poetry.