John Tranter Biography

Australian poet, born in New South Wales, educated at the University of Sydney. He has worked as a publisher's editor and a producer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He was one of a generation of poets, during the late 1960s, whose aims were to introduce Modernism into Australian poetics; according to one critic, Tranter is ‘contemptuous of gum-tree-laden poetry, poetry of assertion and poetry that is not essentially about language itself’. Parallax (1970) frequently deals with distorted perception and is perhaps more traditional than his subsequent works, which are progressively experimental; these include Red Movie (1972), Crying in Early Infancy (1977), Dazed in the Ladies Lounge (1979), Under Berlin: New Poems (1988), and Days in the Capital (1992). In some of his works, such as The Alphabet Murders (1976), Tranter examines the poetic process itself. The Floor of Heaven (1992) consists of four narrative poems in which four characters, interlinked between poems, reveal the core of their lives. He was the editor of Poetry Australia's Preface to the 70s (1970) and The New Australian Poetry (1979).