Barefoot Speech by John Mateer

By (author): John Mateer. John Mateer's early poetry collection, published in 2000 by Fremantle Arts Centre Press, went on to win the 2001 C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry. Mateer, who was born near Johannesburg and emigrated to Australia as a teenager, has described his poetic project generally as one of "immediacy, a sense of physicality, an attention to linguistic and psychic particularities" — a kind of truth-telling meant to counter the isolation of "the radical strangeness of the world." Specific poem contents of this collection could not be independently verified beyond its prize-winning reception.