Secret Leopard: New and Selected Poems 1974-2005

by Rosemary Nissen-Wade

Overview

Secret Leopard is the book which (in paperback) accompanied Australian poet Rosemary Nissen-Wade to Texas when she was a guest of the Austin International Poetry Festival, Forrest Fest Lamesa, and various other poetry events and venues—and where she acquired an enthusiastic following as ”the Poet from Down Under”.

“Rosemary Nissen-Wade is both original and a powerful voice—a voice of humanity in all its suffering and joy” says the publisher’s Preface to the original paperback edition (reproduced in this ebook). "The figures that inhabit her poetry are both intensely real and intensely human. We feel their fragility, their loss, and their sense of wonder and disorientation in the world. These are poems of great immediacy and power—but the one word that has been, most accurately, used to describe their underlying unity is love.”

They date from a time when she was acclaimed within Australia as a dynamic performance poet who was also widely published in hard copy books, journals and anthologies.

Since then Rosemary has found a new audience for her blogs, her digital chapbooks and substantial collaborations with other poets, her poems on twitter, and her several appearances in both electronic and traditional print media.

However her current audience has not been able to enjoy the poetry in Secret Leopard, which also includes major portions of her earlier, out-of-print books, Universe Cat and Small Poems of April. Secret Leopard is now, to all intents and purposes, out of print too. Only a few treasured copies remain in the author’s possession.

Both the ‘new’ and the ‘selected’ poems have stood the test of time and it’s high tine they were made public again by this means.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940154505243
Publisher:	Rosemary Nissen-Wade
Publication date:	08/12/2017
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	380 KB

About the Author

Rosemary Nissen-Wade is an Australian poet, witch, Reiki Master and professional psychic medium. She grew up on the island of Tasmania where, throughout her childhood, the moon rose outside her uncurtained bedroom window; so she thinks she was bound to be poetic and magical (and both started from an early age). She spent much of her adult life in the city of Melbourne, and now lives in a small town in the sub-tropical Northern Rivers region of NSW. Author of three volumes of poetry, several e-chapbooks and some collaborations with other poets, she has been a librarian, editor and book reviewer, and has taught writing in both tertiary institutions and community settings. She has outlived three husbands and has a number of grown-up children, foster-children and step-children as well as several step-grandchildren. She now shares her life with the black cat every witch should have. Rosemary was a founder of the Melbourne Poets Union, started a program of prison poetry workshops, and was part of a poetry theatre group. For a decade she was an independent publisher of Australian poetry, as proprietor of Abalone Press and part of the Pariah Press Cooperative. She has now embraced the online poetry world via blogging, twitter, and international poetry groups and communities. Her first two books of poetry, UNIVERSE CAT and SMALL POEMS OF APRIL, are long out of print, but selections from each are included in her latest monograph, SECRET LEOPARD, of which a few copies remain. Her work has also appeared in an earlier collaboration, SHE TOO (with Helen Patrice, Delaina J. Miller and Leigh D.C. Spencer) in the chapbooks LIFE AFTER DEATH and THE IMAGINED OTHER (the latter in collaboration with Walt Wojtanik, Phillip Barker and Bruce Neidt) and in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her website has details of her non-Smashwords publications and how to acquire them. Most are also on her Amazon page (see Where to buy in print).