3 Review(s)

About the Book: Rob Harle, one of the last Renaissance figures, surviving in a mass society through his multiple artistic interests and pursuits—and making a reified world, a better place by adding a rich aesthetic dimension to its banality!The versatile Nimbin Valley-based Australian thinker, painter, sculptor, writer, reviewer, cover-page designer and a re-born, restive poet, the much-in-demand Rob Harle is rapidly getting global critical attention for the consistency of his works animated by a deep-rooted liberal humanism. The humanist poet regrets the decline in moral values and calls the current society, post-human. He feels that the high-tech and supermarket culture are taking toll on human personality and rendering it defunct or…almost. His digital art works, essays, poems and recent fun fiction pieces—minis—provide a relentless critique of such a reified society where machines are becoming more sacrosanct than the human agency. His two collections of poems, Scratches and deeper wounds (1996) and Mechanisms of desire (2012), are Swiftian in their satiric tone and his minis resemble the literary tradition inaugurated by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Rob’s cover designs and cerebral reviews of global poetry anthologies are earning him the respect of the poets, editors and critics.Here is a literary and critical analysis of his varied works by some of the top-most writers and critics from India and Australia. A kind of dialogue with this senior artist who has studied Comparative Religion and Philosophy; Art, Architecture, Writing and Psychotherapy, among others. He is very passionate about learning and scaling new heights. As a restless artist, he is experimenting things by mixing genres and breaking boundaries. Despite being firmly rooted in the native soil—he sincerely talks of the enduring relevance and profound value of the Dreamtime, a sacred concept for the Aborigines, and, austerity in public life, measures for the regeneration and revitalisation of the contemporary Australia ---Rob is able to create a complex of resonating images, great ideas and a crisp idiom for a reader in a hurry and on the move. But reading Harle is not that simple either. He can be infuriating and fun or both at the same time. His new works---that includes latest fun fiction—prove to be writerly texts that challenge conventional ways of looking and understanding things.A must-read for those interested in contemporary art and global exchanges as critical means of studying, understanding and appreciating the realities of a fast changing world.About the Editors:Sunil Sharma is Principal at Bharat College—affiliated to University of Mumbai, Mumbai—at Badlapur, Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), India. He is a bilingual critic, poet, literary interviewer, editor, translator, essayist and fiction writer. Some of his short stories and poems have already appeared, among others, in prestigious journals like: Hudson View (South Africa), Munyori, The Plebian Rag and the Bicycle Review (all three USA e-zines), Asia Writes; New Woman (Mumbai); Creative Saplings, Brown Critique, Muse India, Thanali and Kritya (Indian e-zines); The Seva Bharati Journal of English Studies (West Bengal), Indian Literature (of Sahitya Akademy, New Delhi), Labyrinth (Gwalior), Poets International (Bangalore), Contemporary Vibes (Chandigarh), Indian Journal of Post-colonial Literatures (Kerala), Prosopisia (Ajmer), and Seven Sisters, a daily from Assam. Some of his poems and shorts have been anthologized in national and international collections, published from India, Canada and USA. Besides that, he is a freelance journalist and blogger. His areas of strength are Marxism, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies. His six short stories and the novel Minotaur are prescribed currently for the undergraduate classes under the Post-colonial Studies at the Clayton University, Morrow, Georgia, USA. Sangeeta Sharma is a senior faculty in the department of English at Birla College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Kalyan, affiliated to the University of Mumbai, India. She is widely published as a critic and poet. Besides that, she is a regular freelance for Mumbai-based national newspapers. She is the director of the UGC-sponsored Functional English Programme and the Centre for Foreign Languages at Birla College. She has also served on the Board of Studies of the University of Mumbai in Functional English and Communication Skills. Recently, she published a book In the Shadows: Women in Arthur Miller’s Playsand co-edited Delightful Dickens: Some tributes with Sunil Sharma published by YKing Books, Jaipur. Many of her literary and critical articles have been anthologized. Currently, she is engaged in a UGC-sponsored Minor Research Project on the Structural, phonological, orthographical, grammatical and lexical differences in British and American English. Under Faculty Exchange Programme, she visited the University Department of English, Clayton State University, Morrow, Georgia, USA, in March-April 2012.