The Problem of Boredom in Paradise: New Australia and Holland and the Netherlands

Paul Hannigan's chapbook Holland and the Netherlands is a set of twelve poems, all included in the Selected; they make sense as a group, linked by form and, less concretely, by tone. Holland and the Netherlands was published in 1970 by Pym-Randall Press (the press was named for its founder James Randall and his cat, Pym). We liked the simple design, and aped it for New Australia, a previously unpublished serial poem by Hannigan. New Australia does not appear in The Problem of Boredom in Paradise.

A copy of New Australia comes free when you purchase the Selected directly from us, either at the AWP conference in Boston this weekend, via this page, the Flim Forum blog, or our website (and only while supplies last).

Here's the last stanza of "Buffalo" from New Australia:

Really Jim
But Australia appears to be
deadd a special miscarriage
Uruguay from a distance

It's a rude, slangy thing, not to be missed.

About the Author

Paul Hannigan was born in Cambridge, MA

in 1936. There, in and around the Boston poetry scene, he grew up as a poet in the company of writers such as Fanny Howe, Bill Knott, William Corbett, DeWitt Henry, Tom Lux, and James Tate. His publishing life extended from the late 60s to the late 70s with a small number of books and chapbooks. He taught at Emerson College and was an occasional editor/reviewer for Ploughshares and The Harvard Review. Hannigan suffered from a series of debilitating illnesses for most of his adult life, from which he eventually succumbed in 2000. He left behind a world of notebooks, unpublished poems, short stories, unfinished novels, fragments, comics and drawings.

About the Book

The Problem of Boredom in Paradise contains selections from a young Hannigan's A Theory of Learning (1966), the chapbook Holland and the Netherlands (Jim Randall's Pym Randall Press, 1970), selections from his books Laughing (Houghton Mifflin, 1970) and The Carnation (Tom Lux's Barn Dream Press, 1972), and the entirety of Bringing Back Slavery (Dolphin Editions, 1976). Also: a large portion of an unpublished manuscript The Higher Slum (1975), an assortment of other unpublished works from the 80s and 90s, and a few original drawings.