Jean Kent

Paris in my pocket

Jean Kent returns to familiar haunts in Paris with this beguiling chapbook, which brings together poems of time and place first published in 1998, drawn from her first residency at the Cité des Arts in the mid nineties. Accompanied by plangent drawings by her husband Martin, these poems will be read and re-read with wistful pleasure by anyone whose heart has missed a beat on crossing the Pont Neuf on a misty winter evening.

But now the inky quills over Paris rewrite
ancient celebrations.
It is the hour of hope and the dome of the world
has a slippery ceiling, a dark blade whose other side
has already turned to silver—
as the huge night swings me over its edge and back, gathering
more than I could imagine into its dream-dented bucket.

Jean Kent. Paris in my pocket

ISBN 978-1-922080-58-5. 32 pages.
Saddle stitch chapbook. 160 x 110mm.
Full colour cover with French flaps.
With 6 colour drawings by Martin Kent
Published 1st March 2016

Price: A$15.00

The Hour of Silvered Mullet

Jean Kent’s new collection comprises poems written over the last 20 years, from a group of rural meditations through to recent reflections of life lived as part of a lakeside community in northern NSW.

Launched initially at the Newcastle Writers Festival in March 2015 and then at a celebratory event at the Cardiff Library, where poet and poetry academic Christopher Pollnitz provided a characteristic wryly humorous and insightful celebration of a book destined to be sought after by Jean Kent’s many readers.

RRP is A$28

The Hour of Silvered Mullet

Jean Kent’s new poetry collection explores the pleasures and heartache of rural and regional life with her inimitable mix of insight, good humour and unforgettable vignettes of people, places and foliage.

Price: A$28.00

Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks

This collection brings together poetry written during two Australia-council funded residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and a family reunion visit to Lithuania.

The themes of home and distance, familiarity and making-strange, family networks and chance encounters are explored with the subtlety of poetic craftsmanship and warmth of geographic and human embrace which characterise this fine poet’s life and work.

Reviews

Martin Duwell Australian Poetry Review 1st July 2013

Paul Summers Rochford Street Review 18th September 2012

Sample Poems

Buy a book on line now!

All you have to do is choose between the elegant $20 paperback and the splendid illustrated limited edition hardback, hand bound in red German cloth, signed and numbered by the author, which sells for $50.

Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks (limited edition hardback)

Jean Kent’s new collection launched in August 2012.
276 signed and numbered copies.
Drawings by Sydney artist Oliver Watts
Sewn cloth bound volume with a red/ silk bookmark ribbon
102pp. 230 x 145 mm

Price: A$50.00

Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks (paperback)

Jean Kent’s new collection, released in August 2012.
B format paperback. 86 pages.

Price: A$25.00

About the author

Born in Chinchilla, Australia, in 1951, Jean Kent grew up in rural Queensland, mainly on the Darling Downs and in Toowoomba. She published her first poems in a literary magazine in 1970, while she was a student at the University of Queensland. Since completing an Arts Degree (majoring in psychology) in 1971, she has alternated between a writing life and paid employment in a variety of jobs, ranging from lift-driving and hand-painting clothes to vocational guidance, educational guidance of disabled children, counselling of students and staff in TAFE colleges and, most recently, teaching creative writing.Jean Kent has published four books of poetry: Verandahs (Hale and Iremonger, 1990; republished by Picaro Press, 2009), Practising Breathing (Hale and Iremonger, 1991), The Satin Bowerbird (Hale and Iremonger, 1998) and Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks (Pitt Street Poetry, 2012). The Spaghetti Maker, a chapbook of selected poems, was published by Picaro Press in 2002. Her poems and stories have also been widely published in literary journals in Australia and overseas.Major awards she has received for her writing include the 1988 National Library Poetry Prize (joint-winner), the 1999 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, the 2003 Somerset National Poetry Prize and the 2009 Dorothy Porter Prize. She was awarded joint second prize for the 1997 Newcastle Poetry Prize and was a runner-up for the 2001 Josephine Ulrick Prize.Jean’s first book Verandahs won both the Anne Elder Prize and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award, and was short-listed for the 1991 NSW State Literary Awards. The Satin Bowerbird was awarded the 1998 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. The manuscript of her fourth collection Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks was highly commended for the 2008 ACT Alec Bolton prize. She has judged several major poetry prizes including the NSW Premier’s Award and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. The Language of Light, t selection of her poetry translated into Chinese was published by Flying Island Books in 2013. In 2014 she was co-editor with Kit Kelen of the anthology A Slow Combusting Hymn: Poetry from and about Newcastle and the Hunter Region (ASM, Cerberus Press). Her most recent collection The Hour of Silvered Mullet was published by Pitt Street Poetry in March 2015.

Jean Kent has received several fellowships and writer’s grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Most recently, she was awarded a six months residency during 2011 at its Keesing Studio in the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Her more usual home is at Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle in New South Wales.

. . . poetry makes nothing happen

Jean Kent

Paris in my pocket

The Hour of Silvered Mullet

Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks

Reviews

Sample Poems

Buy a book on line now!

About the author

Resources and Readers’ Notes

Visit the poet’s website

Simeon Kronenberg

Anthony Lawrence

Widgetized Area3

Subscriber Count