My chapbook Abendland has been reviewed by Philly poet Adam Fieled on his excellent blog. Check out the review here (Wayback) or read it below:

David Prater is an Australian poet, editor of the excellent online journal Cordite. Recently he sent me one of his chapbooks, Abendland. It’s a fascinating read, on several levels. The most interesting dichotomy in these poems for me is the odd combination of an aesthetic largely derived from US poets (in this case, O’Hara and the Beats) and an ethos that rejects corporate, materialistic American values and, in fact, indicts this value system at every turn.

This dichotomy is most apparent in the hilarious, tortured Walt Whitman Service Area, which opens, “I see the throbbing pains of/ your great nation’s bad coffee!” It continues in this vein: “I sing the car electric! May it/ render your oil wars usesless!” This is a poet w an outsider’s perspective on the US, & who writes funny, satirical, political poems “taking the piss.” The interesting thing about this poem is that formally it’s air-tight: four quatrains, each line 7-8 syllables, & clipped diction that rises into sporadic declarative flourishes.

This is not to suggest that Prater has no range. Yo La Tengo is a loving ode to a great band, written in “block” style (a la O’Hara or Ginsberg), w total go on your nerve energy, and ending w the great last lines “each firework of snarls & stripes/ tearing the sky a new arsehole.” Also memorable is the bizarre “anti-love” poem Mit Gas, w its skewered narrative & playful “punctuation tricks” (parentheses never “completed”), Pigtails, another satire w political overtones (though indirectly, and more geared towards the vacuity of pop culture & Paris Hiltons), and Baudelaire in Bruxelles, a travelogue piece. There are actually a bunch of travelogue things here, that give this collection a worldly flavor (and a hint of the Kerouacian). Prater might be called a Neo-Formalist, or a satirist or an elegist. Whatever you want to call him, the sharpness & jagged edges of his poems make for a compelling read. He’s an “Outsider” who is happy to stay that way. If you have a chance, check him out, and Cordite too.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time my work has ever been reviewed, anywhere. I only have a couple of copies of the book left, but I hope to make an announcement soon as to a possible re-release, along the lines of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted.

For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, Pavement’s debut full length album circulated unofficially as a cassette tape in the early 1990s, with the consequence that it was well known “underground” before being released, erm, “overground”.

So, if you’d like to possess a copy of the original chapbook, and would like to be able to tell your grandkids that you got in there first, before the Abendland project went mainstream, contact me via email. Like, today.

In other spellbinding news, sure to get Stung seething, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and re-registered the www.daveydreamnation.com domain, which is now up and running, albeit sans content.

Regular (oh come, all ye faithful) readers will recall the jitch-up that occurred about three years ago, when I first registered the domain, and then a year later forgot to renew the registration, with the result that the site was taken over by a cyber-porn-squatter.

Luckily for me, the squatter lost interest and didn’t renew the registration him or herself. So, here we are again.

I’ll be slowly migrating this blog, plus a few other ones, to the new domain over the next few weeks.