Join us for an afternoon with writer Dave Oliphant, who will be reading from his new poetry collection, María’s Book (Alamo Bay Press). Dave will also be sharing poems from the new edition of Figures of Speech (Host Publications), his translation of renowned Chilean poet Enrique Lihn’s collected work. And we’ll get the afternoon off to a great start with live music from jazz guitarist Margaret Slovak (from 3.30pm).

A book forty-one years in the making, written between 1975 and 2016, Dave Oliphant’s María’s Book presents what Douglas Flaherty has called “a delicately passionate record of an internationally conspired love affair. Oliphant’s poems to his wife are valentines for the ages.” With its publication in 2016, María’s Book marks the golden anniversary of Dave and María’s marriage.

Enrique Lihn’s writings, both creative and critical, are considered in Chile some of the most significant in the country’s distinguished literary history. This bilingual volume is the most complete collection of Lihn’s work in English. As well as some of Lihn’s familiar poems, this volume includes representative poems from a number of his later books, previously uncollected pieces, and selections from his final moving sequence, Diary of Death.