Commended, Best Poetry, IP Picks 2006.
Andrew Leggett’s
second collection is stark, bare and unforgettable. In these interconnecting
poems, by equal measure serious and darkly comic, the ugly is united with
the beautiful to produce a unique aesthetic.
Popular culture provides the surreal framework for the author’s meditations
on death, loss and loneliness, creating a moving overture to playfully grim
explorations into religion and the afterlife.
Andrew Leggett is a Brisbane poet who works
as a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist.
His work has been widely
published in magazines, professional journals, newspapers and anthologies
throughout Australia, the UK, the USA and New Zealand. His first collection,
Old Time Religion and Other Poems, was published by Interactive Press in
1998. The manuscript of his second collection, Dark Husk of Beauty, was Highly
Commended in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Award in 2005, Commended
in the national IP Picks 2006 manuscript competition and has formed the main
body of his Master of Philosophy dissertation in Creative Writing. He was
also a prize winner in the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award in 2004.
Andrew also writes fiction, essays, book reviews and scientific papers on
medical ethics, social research in psychiatry and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
His interests in psychoanalysis, literature, film, mythology, cultural studies,
aesthetics and the visual and performing arts provide a matrix for passionate
expression in his writing.
