Mark Roberts was born in Sydney and has been active in the writing community since the early 1980s. He has been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies both in Australian and overseas. He co-founded the occasional literary journal P76 in 1982 and set up Press in the same year. In 2011 Mark founded he online cultural review journal Rochford Street Review. Concrete Flamingos is his first major collection of poetry.
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“Concrete Flamingos is a long-awaited collection of work from a writer who has been a prominent behind-the-scenes presence in the Sydney literary scene for decades. The work has an uncanny familiarity but traverses a wide conceptual and literary territory. Very Sydney, self-consciously writerly and drily witty. The collection includes moving memory pieces from a Sydney childhood alongside conceptual pieces that reference other writers. Whilst embracing international influences like The New York School, Mark Roberts’ work is distinctly authentic and effortlessly political”.
…………………………………………………………– Anna Couani
“In these ironic contemplative poems, Roberts has examined our literature and assumptions with precision, depth and delicacy…”
…………………………………………………– Rae Desmond Jones
“What is our time, our current moment about? Has the near future arrived? Mark Roberts is a poet I would read for a (non)answer. What cannot be said is said. Here is a voice that slips between the ribs, where you want it to, to offer succour for the incommensurable, where no other balm is available but these poems.”
…………………………………………………………– Moya Costello
ISBN: 978-0-646-58605-2
Pages count: 114
Publication Date: February 2016
Cover Design: Narelle Adair
Rochford Press 