Mike Ladd (poet)

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Mike Ladd (born 1959) is an Australian poet and radio presenter.^[1]

Mike Ladd was born in Berkeley, California while his Australian parents were living and working in America, but he returned to Australia when he was one year old, and grew up in the Adelaide Hills. Ladd began writing poetry at a very young age, but took it up seriously while he was at the University of Adelaide, studying English and Philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1979. Then he joined a new wave rock band called “The Lounge” as a singer and lyricist and later travelled and worked in Europe and Africa. Returning to Australia, in 1983 he joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Adelaide where he currently works as the producer and presenter of Poetica, a weekly program of poetry broadcast on national radio. In 1987, he married the artist Cathy Brooks, and they have two children.

Influenced by the poetry of the Ancient Chinese and Japanese poets, Robert Frost, the European Minimalists and Nazim Hikmet, Ladd's poetry expresses deep ideas and feelings in simple but not simplistic language.

His first book, "The Crack in the Crib", focussed on the child as a symbol of hope and fresh perception and what happens to that consciousness when forced to face the harsh realities of the world. His second book, "Picture’s Edge", concentrated on geographical and social edges, the marginalised, and displaced. In "Close to Home" he celebrated the intimate joys and sorrows of family life, and in "Rooms and Sequences" he explored power games, politics and injustice in the wider world. "Transit", observes key transitional moments in life and well as physical journeys.

Mike Ladd was a guest of Venezuela's World Poetry Festival in 2006, and subsequently a collection of fifty of his poems were published in Spanish, by El Perro y La Rana in 2007.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Crack in the Crib. (1984)
• Picture’s Edge. (1994)
• Close to Home. (2000)
• Rooms and Sequences. (2003)
• Shacklife. (2006)
• Transit. (2007)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• 3 poems

Persondata
NAME	Ladd, Mike
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Australian poet and radio presenter
DATE OF BIRTH	1959
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berkeley, California, United States
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH