The Lost Men:
Collected Poems

Includes the following poems:

The Lost Men

• Threads
• The Whistling Prince
• Fox's Wedding
• Billionaire
• The Flower Man
• Scarecrow
• Family Photographs
• Family 1
• The Brother Poems:
• Trapper
• Progeny
• Ashes
• Frankie Boy
• Pineapple

The Way of Pink

• Before The Dogs Come
• Celebrating Wolves
• The Way of Pink
• Sophie
• Celluloid Queen
• Grandmother's Hats
• Dunnyman's Daughter
• Leila
• These Big Women
• Jacaranda Blue
• Virtual Venus

In Its Own Way

• Mother's Day
• Empty Nest
• Red Swan
• Tsunami
• Beloved
• Magpie
• Green Trucks
• Lifeline
• Spat
• Traffic

Sleepwalker

• Harold
• After Cronulla
• Senator Bob Kerrey Confesses
• Embryo
• Martyr
• Someone's Son
• Sorry

Sometimes Paradise

• Pomegranate Moon
• Sunbathers Revisited
• Moods 1
• Moods 2
• Stone
• On Midsummer Eve
• Metro Stop Opera
• Designer Tree
• Bonsai
• Birds
• Solitude
• Snakeskin
• Vale Brando
• Bid's Garden

‘In this impressive collection, varied and perceptive in theme and location, Suzanne McCourt offers poems of insight, concern, love and at times, a wry lightness. With her ability to create character, individual voice and depiction of event, The Lost Men is a book to appreciate, to reflect on, to re-visit.’

Lerys Byrnes

‘There is a discipline of vision in Suzanne McCourt’s poems, with a plain speaking style that is nevertheless beautifully and smartly stylish. When you read, ‘Family wedding/everyone seated/strategically’ you know you are in the hands of someone who knows how to use words to make points you don’t even know at first are being made. When you meet the man whose ‘mouth is a steel trap rusted shut in complaint’ you won’t forget him or his type or the many other lost men in these breathtaking portraits of all the ways men grow and don’t grow, men whose mothers recall, ‘He was the most beautiful baby’. McCourt has the gift of packing a character into a phrase: there is the tortured returned soldier with ‘neck tight as a cork in a bottle’ or the grandmother who ‘was big on doing the right thing’. I felt like applauding when I read, ‘These big women/who come to the beach/are not finished yet.’ Pause before you open this book because it will take you up and rush you along in its swirling world of broken, heroic and beautiful characters.’

Kevin Brophy