A Rare and Vacant Hour

Introduced by Friendly Street Poets collective veteran Dr. Graham Rowlands, A Rare & Vacant Hour is the first collection of poetry from experimental "beat" street performer and avant-garde poet Ivan Rehorek, aka Avaanche. The first Australian poet from this collective to bring his poetry to the digital age with this pioneering ebook, Rehorek here collects his much-loved series of poetic meditations of famous people's cats. In the process, he too - in the true beat tradition - proves himself a genuine cool cat.

But the cat poems are just the first section in Rehorek's first anthology. Springboarding from his editorial duties at Adelaide's famous Friendly Street collective, Rehorek here shreds the formality and stagnation of the poetry establishment to bring to ebook a fresh and contemporary re-validation of poetry as a vital and poignant art form. Anyone who thought poetry was a dead art and the domain of stale English lit courses has never read the work of Ivan Rehorek.

Or, as Australian veteran poet Dr. Graham Rowlands put it: "Romanticism permeates Ivan’s love lyrics, music lyrics and love-music lyrics. Even so, intense feeling is sometimes qualified by a kind of surrealism and by the use of striking puns which are paradoxically part of the lyricism. Whatever Romanticism remains in Ivan’s other poems is sorely tested by his travels to arid regions and his portraits of unknown, well-known and too well-known characters. Václav Havel and Adolf Hitler share pages with ‘Attila the Glum’ and the deluded individual who could have been Beethoven—or perhaps Beethoven’s cat."