Secret Leopard: New and Selected Poems 1974-2005

Secret Leopard is the book which (in paperback) accompanied Australian poet Rosemary Nissen-Wade to Texas when she was a guest of the Austin International Poetry Festival, Forrest Fest Lamesa, and various other poetry events and venues—and where she acquired an enthusiastic following as ”the Poet from Down Under”.

“Rosemary Nissen-Wade is both original and a powerful voice—a voice of humanity in all its suffering and joy” says the publisher’s Preface to the original paperback edition (reproduced in this ebook). "The figures that inhabit her poetry are both intensely real and intensely human. We feel their fragility, their loss, and their sense of wonder and disorientation in the world. These are poems of great immediacy and power—but the one word that has been, most accurately, used to describe their underlying unity is love.”

They date from a time when she was acclaimed within Australia as a dynamic performance poet who was also widely published in hard copy books, journals and anthologies.

Since then Rosemary has found a new audience for her blogs, her digital chapbooks and substantial collaborations with other poets, her poems on twitter, and her several appearances in both electronic and traditional print media.

However her current audience has not been able to enjoy the poetry in Secret Leopard, which also includes major portions of her earlier, out-of-print books, Universe Cat and Small Poems of April. Secret Leopard is now, to all intents and purposes, out of print too. Only a few treasured copies remain in the author’s possession.

Both the ‘new’ and the ‘selected’ poems have stood the test of time and it’s high tine they were made public again by this means.