Timoshenko Aslanides' web site

Praise of my books

Praise for A calendar of flowers: "Original, meticulously crafted, witty and most readable...a major contribution to Australian literature." (Judith Wright, back cover blurb.)

Praise for AnniVersaries: "AnniVersaries is overwhelmingly positive, full of crowding life and vigour, full indeed of a bewildering richness of human difference, all drawn from what is often dismissed as outworn Australian life and tradition. It fulfils the timeless duty of giving a community good and noble human models in which it can take pride, and it makes a wealth of discoveries which refresh our sense of Australia." (Les Murray, back cover blurb). "Meticulously researched, highly poetic and most original work" (Judith Wright, back cover blurb)

Praise for Australian things: "It's not just its innovative features of form and style. The landscape reoccupation is present, but in this work there is satisfying integration of the natural, the rural, the urban, the social and the personal which distinguishes it from the writing of many of his peers." "Australian things is one of the few books by male poets to which I have returned several times, drawn by the pleasures and challenges of freshness, originality and individuality, and by authenticity." (Both comments by Bev. Roberts, ABC Radio National, 1 July 1990). "Writing in a sonnet-like unit Aslanides has done something quite original here... there are many satisfying quirky and witty turns of image and observation throughout the volume." (Rod Moran, Australian Book Review, May 1990). "What he has produced is a volume of verse whose inventiveness, technical skill and intelligence are out of the ordinary." (Professor Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times, 3 March 1990).

Praise for Australian Alphabet: "Aslanides uses a middle- to high-level diction, and his poetic forms are similarly "high" rather than demotic art...more akin to someone like the later Auden, cosmopolitan and urbane, than to the vernacular poets. Aslanides is formidably knowledgeable, his range of historical, botanical and geographical references is unequalled by all but a few poets." (Lawrence Bourke, Australian Book Review, November 1992.) "These artistically complex but disarmingly simple and accessible poems deserve the wide readership they will obtain, especially among those Australians who, sensing the irrelevance of European modes of thought in contemporary Australia, want to listen to the resonances of a lyric poetry which celebrates what was made, and continues to make us, what we are." (Peter Sculthorpe, foreword to Australian alphabet.) "One of the most original poetic voices in Australia." (Professor Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times, 9 January 1993) "...head shaking admiration...for speaking of himself to his readers as "your poet" and defining an Australian as "anyone with a line of me in memory"" (Martin Duwell, The Australian, 31 October 1992)

Praise for Passacaglia and fugue: "These technically brilliant, intelligently witty poems make a very big contribution to the gifts Greece and her people have already given to Australia. They ought to be noticed and they ought to be read." (Judith Wright, back cover blurb) "Timoshenko Aslanides is a poet who writes with passion and distinction about love and history. He deserves a wide reading public." (Manning Clark, back cover blurb)

Praise for The Greek connection: "Timoshenko Aslanides, in his book The Greek connection, shows that he can write several different kinds of poems extremely well...Above all, and unusually for the writer of a first book of verse, Aslanides deals confidently with rhyme and metre. His language is free of cliches and the writing at all times shows intelligence and wit." (Gavin Ewart, British poet and broadcaster and chair of the British Commonwealth Poetry Prize 1978 judging panel)