publications
micromacro, 2006
"Whether he's focussing on the minute worlds of insects or big political themes, rob walker's poetry is witty, incisive and nicely attuned to the 'mouthfeel' of language.
His black sense of humour is a bonus." - Mike Ladd
" walker grabs you by the scruff of the neck and pulls you up through a chemical mosaic of earth and ocean until you confront your earliest evolutionary ancestors. Then there are insects, spiders, birds, cats - and the human race. walker finds a wide range of subjects variously eliciting his wit, concern, outrage or empathy. He achieves memorable poems through a combination of startling visual imagery and a dialogue with language itself." - Graham Rowlands
" rob walker combines sharp perception, compassion and humour to create crisp intersections of time and place. Airy shortcuts, sensuous imagery, and a warm sympathy combine in poems that range from insect life to human relationships, from landscape to love." - Jan Owen
sparrow in an airport from New Poets Ten, 2005.
"... written with apparent simplicity and without engaging in sophisticated word play, there is a constant thread of preoccupation running from the local to the global. Some poems are marbled through with a contained distress or acrid criticism which hides in the form of humorous satire... In “colin powell addresses the UN”, walker moves to the scene of international politics and American intervention in Iraq. :
it’s powerpoint of course. / all power. no point. / microsoftware / before the macrohardware / all style no substance / erect an argument on flawed foundations / holes the size / of bombcraters / a colon / : pregnant pause before a war /
lives reduced
not to dot points
but bullet points"
Susan Ballyn, Cercles, Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone.
“rob walker's poems concern themselves with injustice, beauty, memory, impressions, captivity and misplaced assistance”
Debra Zott, API Review of Books, Journal of Australian Studies
Friendly Street Thirty (as editor, with Louise Nicholas.) 2006
"Housed in a satisfyingly clean and handsome volume are the works of first-time tyros and those who have been featured regularly since the first Friendly Street annual reader or who have found over the years a national, even an international voice. Dip into this fecund variety, from haiku to concrete verse, wit to wisdom, or read from cover to cover and marvel at the sway that poetry supposedly unpopular and unpublishable, still holds over our hearts and our imaginations." Katherine England, Saturday Review, The Adelaide Advertiser.
"So with over one hundred members... you can imagine the range of quality, theme, tone, length, style etc. And this anthology provides us with a taste of the diversity that Rob Walker and Louise Nicholas had to endure through their sifting and sorting through a seemingly endless pile of poems. But the two noted poets have managed to put together an anthology that, yes, changes mood from page to page but is somehow whole unto itself. It is an anthology that is lively, contemplative and vividly accessible. These poems prove that Adelaide, as far as the poetry scene goes, is on the map and there is not a single poem in this collection that does not deserve to be published."
Heather Taylor-Johnson, SAETA Newsletter, Summer, 2007.
graphic design / surface detail
All three publications above had covers designed by one of my two talented sons, Ben. You can see examples of his body of work at : www.surfacedetail.com