Summer was a Fast Train Without Terminals
MERLINDA BOBIS
Shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year (Poetry) Award.
Other awards won by Merlinda Bobis
- SHORTLISED Steele Rudd White Turtle
- WINNER National Book Award (Fiction category) from the Manila Critics Circle White Turtle
- AWGIE Award for radio script Rita's Lullaby (Australian Writers Guild) 1998.
- Prix Italia Award for a play Rita's Lullaby.
- 1997 Radio National Short Story Award.
- Out of Ashes Trans Tasman Short Story Competition1998.
- 1995 Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize Rita's Lullaby.
Cover Photo: Kian The©
Cover Design:
The Modern Art Production Group
Permission to use images and text
should be directed to Spinifex Press
in my dialect, you know, punctuated with cicadas and their eternal afternoons - To love in a language "prised between one's wishbone". To sing of a landscape where village girls "once burst the moon with giggles". To dance "through the fattest eye of a ricegrain". To do all these in peace and war, especially in war.
I, too, can love you
-
This is the wish embodied in Bobis' poetry as she takes us through a journey from the Philippines to Australia.
- I am the mouth remembering
- the coupled heaving of women
- and men in another passion
- called a war.
- I am deeply furrowed
- by the universal scar.
Summer was a Fast Train without Terminalswas released in the UK in December 1998 and in the USA & Canada in March 1998.
I liked best the passionate poems redolent with the images, food, scents and rituals of her Filipino heritage...
From her epic Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon to sharp reflections on loss and longing, and finally to Promenade, an extended, erotic poetry-dance-drama, Bobis traces the cartography of desire and its intimacy with death.
