Books

‘CARTE BLANCHE’

Collection of poems. Winner of the 2017-18 Noel Rowe Poetry Award. Winner of the 2020 Mary Gilmore Award, for the best first book of poetry published in Australia in 2019. Available from Vagabond Press as a paperback, or a limited edition hardback.

Thom Sullivan’s debut collection of poems, CARTE BLANCHE, traverses the exactitudes of place and time – from a distinctively Australian suburbia, to farming landscapes in South Australia’s Mount Lofty Ranges, to Australia’s renowned Great Ocean Road, and the interior terrains of consciousness and perception. The poems are memorable, succinct in their expression, precise in their effect, and notable for their innovative use of syntax and punctuation. Carte Blanche is a collection of poems that’s finely realised and keenly felt.

David McCooey’s review in Australian Book Review

Geoff Page’s review in The Canberra Times

Martin Duwell’s review in Australian Poetry Review

Matthew Bulfer’s review in Westerly

Praise for CARTE BLANCHE

‘Sullivan presents a sharp collection of quietly spoken poems dealing with the complexities of human relationships in a vanishing world. The manuscript has considerable formal variety from spoken interior monologues and reflections to a series of imagistic notations. It also demonstrates a thoughtful and exciting use of punctuation and syntax.’ NOEL ROWE POETRY AWARD’S JUDGES’ REPORT

‘Carte Blanche is an arresting calling-card, and – for me – it is one of this year’s most exciting poetic débuts.’ DAVID MCCOOEY, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

‘It’s satisfying to observe that the sophistication and idiosyncratic uniqueness of Thom Sullivan’s Carte Blanche have recently been recognised by the judges of the 2020 Mary Gilmore Award for the best first book of poetry in Australia last year.’ GEOFF PAGE, THE CANBERRA TIMES

‘Thom Sullivan’s Carte Blanche is a book of thresholds, of glimpses into the everyday and what the everyday sometimes hides. […] This is a volume of fine registrations of the world we share, a volume of ‘companionable words’.’ KEVIN HART

‘Carte Blanche, by its very title, welcomes the reader honestly yet artfully in; in to lucidly thought-through poems which balance virtuosity and spontaneity, sense and intellect. These are poems of a swift and convincing trajectory with a feeling for nature as well as human nature and a sense of their interactions and interconnections…’ JAN OWEN

‘The poems in Carte Blanche employ a cosmopolitan sensibility and experimental poetics, playing with form, structure, language and meaning, even interrogating the function of poetry itself. Sullivan packs the beautifully lyrical poems in Carte Blanche with brilliant metaphors and similes, parataxis and juxtaposition, surprising insights, and a masterful combination of abstract and concrete language to produce a stunning debut collection.’ NATHANAEL O’REILLY

‘Few books published in Australia in recent years have given me as much pleasure as Carte Blanche. Sullivan combines an attentive ear, precise and stylish diction, a sharp eye, and the restless energy of invention – and a reader is convicted by the poet’s authenticity, his joy in experiment. This is a remarkable debut that shows Sullivan to be among the best of Australia’s young poets.’ AIDAN COLEMAN

‘THE INFINITE DIRT’

Anthology, published 2014.

The Infinite Dirt, edited by Jelena Dinic, Gareth Roi Jones and Thom Sullivan, presents the most outstanding poems from the thirty-eighth year of Friendly Street Poets, Australia’s longest running open-mic poetry reading community. ‘The anthology digs deep into the preoccupations of South Australia’s poets, from the ground surface right down to what TS Eliot called ‘the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being.”

‘LIGHT AND GLORIE’

Anthology, published 2012 (available from Amazon).

In 2012, Thom Sullivan and Aidan Coleman invited South Australian poets to write about the renowned stained glass in St. Bart’s Church, Norwood, one of Adelaide’s oldest churches. Many of South Australia’s – and Australia’s – finest poets took up the challenge. Light & Glorie, an anthology edited by Sullivan and Coleman, showcases the new work written in response to the windows. The poems – ranging from devotional to sceptical, from detailed to digressive, from the personal and aesthetic to the historical – are part of a long literary tradition of writing about works of art. The project culminated in the publication of the anthology, and a reading at which poets read alongside the windows.

• ABC Radio National ‘The Spirit of Things’ podcast, with images of the windows
• Robert Rath’s photos of the reading

‘AIRBORNE’

Short collection of poems, published 2009 (out of print).

Sullivan, Thom, 2009, Airborne, in Emmett, ML, Hardy, R & Sullivan, T, 2009, New Poets 14, ed. C Black, Wakefield.

Praise for AIRBORNE

‘This collection demonstrates a control that is sure but not rigid, that reveals itself only as formal grace. The poems are memorable: their imagery stays with us, their pacing and ordering are remembered for delivering an experience that the reader feels sharply.’ KEN BOLTON