I saved the pieces of you
when you fell apart

Robert Adamson wrote that Robbie Coburn’s poems “come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence”. Largely set within stark farmland and surreal, nightmarish dreams, Coburn’s new collection of poems, Ghost Poetry, is haunted by depression, trauma, addiction, memory, regret, and the spectre of mutilation and violence inflicted on the human body, accompanied by the desire to leave.

But through this, there is always the process of the poet writing; an act that both dissects and preserves experience and suffering. This act ultimately creates, as Leonard Cohen wrote, an engine of survival.

Always vulnerable, often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.

Robbie Coburn’s books include And I Could Not Have Hurt You, The Other Flesh and Rain Season. His poems have been published in Poetry, Meanjin, Island, Westerly, and elsewhere, and anthologised in books including Writing to the Wire and To End All Wars. He is currently based in Melbourne.