Michael Brennan (poet)

Michael Brennan, (born 1973), is an Australian poetryAustralian poet]].

Brennan is the director of Vagabond Press, and the Australian editor of Poetry International Web. He graduated from the University of Sydney, completed a Ph.D. thesis on the work of poet Robert Adamson entitled "The Impossible Gaze: Robert Adamson and the work of negativity."

Writing
According to critic David McCooey, Brennan's books The Imageless World and Unanimous Night form "the first parts of a triptych", and both books exhibit a "...complex and stylish interplay between opposing categories: light and dark; presence and absence; prose and poetry..." McCooey notes that "[t]he poetry is both brilliantly imagistic and pared back, both worldly and almost mystical in its concerns. In both books we find similar interests and motifs: hunger, darkness, eroticism, the earth and the sky..."

Recognition
Brennan's first collection of poetry, The Imageless World, won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2004. His second collection, Unanimous Night, won the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize.

Poetry

 * The Imageless World. Cambridge: Salt, 2003.
 * Language Habits (chapbook), 2006.
 * Sky was sky (with Akiko Muto), 2007.
 * Atopia (with Kay Orchison), 2007.
 * Unanimous Night. Cambridge: Salt 2008.

Edited

 * Absence and Negativity in Australian Literature, 2000.
 * Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, 2000.
 * Noel Rowe, A Cool and Shaded Heart, 2008.