Timoshenko Aslanides
Australian alphabet
Butterfly Books, 1992
“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.”
This book contains 26 poems, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Peter Sculthorpe aptly summarises the book in this extract from his Foreword: "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 resonance of a lyric poetry which celebrates what has made, and continues to make us, what we are."
About the Author
Timoshenko Aslanides (1943 - 2020) was born on Christmas Eve, 1943, in the Crown Street Women's Hospital, in Sydney, to John Paul Aslanides (1901–1962), a 1925 immigrant to Australia from the Pontic Greek community in Kerasus (on the Black Sea coast) and Olive Emma Browne (1910–1993), daughter of a pastoralist family from Lockhart, New South Wales. Aslanides graduated BA (Music) from the University of Sydney in 1967 and B.Ec from the Australian National University in 1976.
He began writing poetry after he moved to Canberra in 1972, where he joined the Australian Public Service. His first book of poems, The Greek Connection, won him the British Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1978 for the best first book of poetry in English published the previous year in the British Commonwealth excluding England; he was the first Australian to win this prize.
He produced 16 books of poetry. His fourth book of poetry, Australian Things, was awarded joint second prize in the 1988 bicentennial poetry awards for book-length collections. This book was inspired by a remark, in a conversation with his mentor, by Judith Wright, who had written to him in November 1979, inviting him to lunch at her bush-cottage retreat near Braidwood, in southern New South Wales. Aslanides regarded the subsequent and enduring friendship with Judith Wright as both an apprenticeship as well as a rewarding artistic relationship for both poets.
Because he was Australian-born and Australian-focussed and, since July 1985, a full-time professional Australian poet, he did not identify as an "ethnic" poet; nor did he write "multicultural" poetry. Though he felt that most, if not all of his poetry has its origin in love, the context of this affection is the celebration of the natural and built environments of Australia, and the history and imaginative genius of the people.
