At 3pm, Saturday 9 July, ABC’s Radio National will broadcast a 35 minute “Poetica” special on Peter Bakowski’s volume of portrait poems, Beneath Our Armour”.
In the program Peter Bakowski speaks to Mike Ladd about the genesis of the poems and reads a selection of works. Poems read on the program will include:-
10 Rosebank Terrace, Lower Templestowe
Bernard and Monique
Portrait of the colour black
Portrait of blood
Sylvia Plath writing in her journal
Blues
Macau, City of Exiles
Adozindo Fernandes and his family
Portrait of Verna Tan
The program will be repeated at 3p.m. on Thursday, 14 July. The program may also be downloaded via the following link http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/stories/2011/3241325.htm
Peter Bakowski was born in Melbourne in 1954 to Polish-German parents. His second book, In the Human Night, won the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. His sixth, and most recent collection is Beneath our Armour, a book of poems made up of portraits of real people such as Sylvia Plath and Diego Rivera, portraits of imaginary people, and of places and things, such as 'Portrait of blood' or 'Portrait of the colour black'. Part of the book was written while Bakowski was on writer's residencies in Macau and at Suzhou University in China.
