Beneath Our Armour

Peter Bakowski

‘I am amazed at Peter Bakowski’s endurance and proficiency. He has penned an extraordinary body of work   and a new volume is always a joyful occasion.’ — Stephen Cummings

Peter Bakowski makes a major contribution to understanding the human condition, starting with himself, encouraging us to think more deeply and act more compassionately and responsibly. His portraits and travel poems are autobiographical, thoughtful, musical,  disturbing. — Barry Jones

ISBN 9780980517941 * Paperback, 96 pages * RRP: $19.95 * Poetry

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Beneath Our Armour is unique. This sequence of portrait poems covers vast tracts of history, geography, and personae in a way that is at once intimate and epic.

Intimate, because Bakowski imagines his way into the lives of individuals as radically disparate as Cyril Connolly, Diego Rivera, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Smart.

Epic, because he transports us from Krakow in Poland, to Old Macau, and onto Bedford Square, London and even Lower Templestowe in Melbourne — and from pitched battles to civilised dinner parties.

Intense, disturbing and memorable, Beneath Our Armour is an assured and beautifully crafted new book from one of Australia’s finest contemporary poets.

Peter Bakowski was born in Melbourne in 1954 to Polish-German parents. He has been writing poetry for over twenty-five years. His poems have been published in literary magazines worldwide and have been translated into Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Bengali, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Polish. He has been writer-in-residence in Rome, Paris, Macau, Suzhou, Greenmount (Western Australia), Battery Point (Tasmania), Broken Hill (New South Wales), and at the Arthur Boyd estate Bundanon (New South Wales). His first book, In the Human Night, won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry.