Owen Bullock
Work and Play
Recent Work Press, 2017
So I look where they don’t think it could be, and there it is.
In this new collection, Owen Bullock asks ‘what constitutes work for someone who must play in order to create?’ It’s a question addressed through formal contrast, aural unpredictability, and a genuine immersion of all the senses.
Bullock combines prose and lineated poems with his love of language play, poems found in the fat air of conversation, and the contrasts that memory and experience conjure. With this is a genuine love of whimsy pushed to the absurd, and pushed again into poignancy.
About the Author
Owen Bullock is originally from Cornwall and lived for 25 years in Aotearoa New Zealand before migrating to Australia in 2014. He began writing haiku in 1999 and has published four collections: Wild Camomile (Post Pressed, 2009); Breakfast with Epiphanies (Oceanbooks, 2012); Urban Haiku (Recent Work Press, 2015), and River’s Edge (Recent Work Press, 2016). He is a former editor of Kokako, New Zealand’s only specialist haiku magazine, and was one of the editors who produced Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol IV (Kei Books, 2012). He has also published three books of longer poems, Sometimes the sky isn’t big enough (Steele Roberts, 2010); Semi (Puncher & Wattmann, 2017), and Work & Play (Recent Work Press, 2016), as well as the novella, A Cornish Story (Palores, 2010). Owen holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Canberra where he currently teaches.
