With Sappho in the Antipathies: An Irish poet’s love letter to Melbourne (and Sydney)

Description Impractical, technophobic, shy and a nervous traveller, James Harpur suspected he had the perfect qualities for not going to Australia when the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize gave him the chance to visit the country in 2017. House-sitting in Melbourne, expecting to be quietly writing and researching his putative ancestor, Charles Harpur, the ‘father of Australian poetry’, the Irish poet instead had one of the most intense and varied months of his life. He met a cast of unforgettable characters, and came across the menagerie of Australia’s wildlife, but none more delightful than Sappho, the arthritic cat under his temporary care. ‘Here we see the tourist’s delight at seeing some of Australia’s unique fauna: a kangaroo, an emu, a sleepy wombat and a Tasmanian devil that he thinks looks rather cute until he learns that its demonic tag comes from its horrendous screech, as well as powerful jaws and a ferocious appetite.  Sweet little piggy is actually the Rottweiler of marsupials.’ – ANZ Litlovers About the author: James Harpur (born 1956) is a British-born Irish poet who has published eight books of poetry. He has won a number of awards, including the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, the UK National Poetry Competition and the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize. He has also published books of non-fiction and a novel, The Pathless Country. He lives in West Cork and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts. Stephen Fry wrote about James Harpur’s book The Examined Life in glowing terms. In the foreword to the book, Fry described it as ‘A quite marvellous work … an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’