Apocrypha

Vagabond Press is proud to announce the re-release of Peter Boyle's multi-award winning Apocrypha. Apocrypha remains one of the most remarkable works of the imagination to come out of Australia. a compendium of fitctive translations from ancient worlds real and imagined, Apocrypha uses a variety of texts - poems, prose poems, philosophic dialogue, travel writing, biography - to meditate on the nature of our contemporary world. Th e imagined poet-translator, the deceased classicist William o'Shaunessy, creates from his fragments a work that recalls at times Swift 's Gulliver's Travels, at times Borges or Pessoa. on its release in 2010, Apocrypha changed what was possible in Australian poetry. Boyle's masterpiece sits easily beside the best of Borges, Marquez or Calvino.

"In Apocrypha, Peter Boyle retrieves the luminous classical landscape that is the birthplace of Western civilisation and the Western psyche. Setting out to find the discarded or forbidden parts of this landscape, his search brings to light a forgotten but distinctly classical undercurrent of animism, of a piece, in its intellectual lucidity and precision, with classical science and philosophy. in the retrieved fragments of William O'Shaunessy's "translations", the outer world of poplars, ibis, windmills, commerce and political vagary interflows seamlessly with inner worlds of sorrow, anguish, love and loss to create a sparkling wholeness of meaning and matter that seems utterly lost to the West today." - Freya Mathews


"...a poem, a magic spell, a palimpsest, a leap into fantasy, a stab in the heart of time, a lost treatise on forgotten tribes, a catalogue of incredible rites, a forest of unknown myths, an underground literary manifesto, a rejection of one in the face of many, a cry for unity in the midst of duality, a wish to exhaust language, a coming together of Being, a labour of love, a Book of Sand, a literary hoax." - Aashish Kaul, Southerly