Description

The Garden Black – a collection of speculative fantasies

The Garden Black poetry collection is Frank Prem’s first venture into fantasy and speculative fiction, based on the dual themes of rain forest and fantasy. These realms, as encountered in The Garden Black, are vast.

The Diverse Garden

. The rainforest becomes a desert, and then the sea.

. A lonely man alone in a satellite orbits the earth while playing his violin and pondering. A wistful girl alone in a garden gazes up at the passing light and dances.

. Od Ovo – a youth who is from here, raises the dust of frustrated boredom on a mining asteroid, and cannot believe traveller tales of places where water falls from the sky.

. What colour are the flowers in the Reaper’s garden? They are all colours . . . They are black.

Welcome to the speculative fantasies that are The Garden Black.

Other Work by Frank Prem

Other Free Verse poetry books by Frank Prem include:

• Small Town Kid – a memoir of growing in rural Australia in the 1960s and 70s.
• Devil In The Wind – the voices of victims and survivors the Black Saturday Bushfires in Victoria (Australia) in 2009.
• The New Asylum – a memoir of a lifetime spent in psychiatry.

Picture-Poetry Books by Frank Prem include:

• Sheep On The Somme – poetry to accompany images taken on The Somme and Western Front during the first World War
• Voices In TheTrash– in which the objects found in a Trash and Treasure Barn tell their stories.
• Children’s books The Beechworth Bakery Bears and Waiting For Frank-Bear– in which the Teddy Bears resident at the Beechworth Bakery introduce themselves and their lives to young readers.

The author would like to acknowledge the pivotal support role played by the writing family that are the Rainforest Writing Retreat. The origins of this poetry collection reside in an exploration of ideas for a submission to the RWR anthology Short Stories of Forest and Fantasy.