Author Description

Gone: Satirical poems: New & Selected brings together a diverse range of metrical constructions including villanelles, sonnets, raunchy ballads and whimsical ballades. There is an invigorating, sardonic edge to Oliver's poetic, driven by an often oblique and dark humour. The ballad, for instance, is a demotic form, but it takes a particular skill (one Oliver owns to a high degree) to write with the kind of verve that enlivens rhythms both comic and colloquial. Here we have tales of murder, drunkenness and debauchery. We live in the Age of the Anthropocene. Oliver deftly lampoons a world consumed by its own narcissistic concerns.