Another Fine Morning in Paradise

Deb Matthews-Zott wrote of Sharkey's previous book: 'The Sweeping Plain dismantles the architecture and reconstructs the minutiae and epiphanies of contemporary life with a lyrical wit.' Geoff Page has remarked on Sharkey's Swift-like satire, and Martin Duwell has declared, 'Almost nothing in Michael Sharkey's previous work... prepares us for the shock of how good, how sheerly enjoyable, The Sweeping Plain is.' Another Fine Morning In Paradise, Sharkey's first collections since The Sweeping Plain, recounts the droll customs of suburban and rural Cockaigne, the existential states of earthly and other paradises, and re-imagines a poet's fragmented Australia. Isolation, loss and heartbreak are never far from these projections of the good life, in poems that characteristically celebrate endurance with compassion, allusiveness and wit. 'Elegance in plain clothes, that's Michael Sharkey.' - Simon Patton in Island