Sydney-based publisher Puncher and Wattmann published my second full-length poetry collection, Leaves of Glass, in 2013.

If a week is a long time in politics, then six years is an absolute eternity. And while poetry and politics are hardly comparable, the fact that it took me six long years to publish my second collection of poems reflects the changes that occured in my life between 2007, when We Will Disappear ‘hit’ the shelves, and 2013, when Leaves of Glass saw the light of day.

To draw another analogy, music critics often speak of a band’s ‘difficult’ second album: think The Stone Roses’ miserable follow-up to their self-titled debut, for example. Now, it would be an exaggeration to say that I felt any kind of pressure to come up with something special for my second collection, the truth is that at the end of 2007 I was already working on what would become Leaves of Glass.

Leaves of Glass assembles the shards of a lost and broken correspondence into a jagged lens, and examines imagination and sympathy. Wild, sharp and witty, these poems find their languages in the gaps between letters and the silences between words, and build a radiant, vital and eloquent collection.

—Felicity Plunkett

The first thing that happened that year was that I discovered the little-known correspondence between Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd (1866–1953), reproduced in the pages of Australian literary magazine Overland in the 1960s. Leaves of Glass features re-imaginings of both poets’ works.

The second thing that happened was that I received a grant from Arts Victoria in 2007 to work on the collection.

But the third thing that happened was probably the most drastic: in early 2008, I moved to the Netherlands. The majority of the poems in Leaves of Glass were written between March and June 2008 while living in Den Haag.

However one approaches this wonderfully original and sophisticated book, it is Prater’s masterful, often unpredictable use of rhythm and expression, and his effortless fusion of humour with melancholy and lyricism with idiosyncrasy, which mark him not only as an insightful student of culture and history but also as one of the foremost Australian poets of his generation.

—Ali Alizadeh

Earlier versions of a number of the poems first appeared in various journals including The Age, Blast, Going Down Swinging, Jacket, Southerly, YB, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Southerly, PFS Post (USA), Stop, Drop and Roll, Blackbox Manifold (UK) and Jacket 2 (USA). Several have been anthologised, in Best Australian Poems (Black Inc., 2011) and Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011).

Two poems, ‘Walt Whitman Service Area’ and ‘Gaeltacht’, first appeared in my chapbook Abendland (2006, self-published) and therefore pre-date the rest of the collection.

Leaves of Glass was launched at two Puncher and Wattmann events: the first took place in the Bella Union bar in Trades Hall, Melbourne, on 1 December 2013. The second launch took place at the Balmain Town Hall in Sydney on 14 December 2013.

Leaves of Glass was reviewed in Australian Book Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the Weekend Australian, Westerly and Southerly.

More than twenty of the letters that O’Dowd and Whitman exchanged between 1889 and 1891 are now held at the State Library of Victoria, including O’Dowd’s first letter to Whitman in 1889, which was never sent.