Philip Armstrong Knihy

The poems in Sinking Lessons portray the vitality of a world full of things and beings we too often disregard, using language that vibrates in harmony with the lively tales it tells—from small, everyday events to stories of shipwrecks and strandings, resurrections and reanimations, arctic adventures and descents into the underworld. The cast of characters includes members of the poet’s family alongside heroes from myth and literature, such as Orpheus, Scheherazade, and Frankenstein’s Creature. And crowding in upon these, at all times, a multitude of non-human sun and stars, wind and water, mud and sand, body fluids, decaying matter, chemicals organic and inorganic, and a great many fishes and birds and beasts. Sinking Lessons is the first collection of poetry from Philip Armstrong, winner of the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.

This book charts the development of capitalism in the post-war period and describes the challenges that the system has faced since 1945. It describes the measures that were taken to deal with the post-war slump and the ways in which most capitalist economies achieved steady growth and affluence in the 1950s and 1960s. It goes on to show how this boom was undermined by inflation and falling profits, and high unemployment ensued.