Secret Leopard: New and Selected Poems 1974-2005

By Rosemary Nissen-Wade

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosemary Nissen-Wade
• Release date: Aug 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781942005292

Rosemary Nissen-Wade

Rosemary Nissen-Wade is an Australian poet, witch, Reiki Master and professional psychic medium. She grew up on the island of Tasmania where, throughout her childhood, the moon rose outside her uncurtained bedroom window; so she thinks she was bound to be poetic and magical (and both started from an early age). She spent much of her adult life in the city of Melbourne, and now lives in a small town in the sub-tropical Northern Rivers region of NSW. Author of three volumes of poetry, several e-chapbooks and some collaborations with other poets, she has been a librarian, editor and book reviewer, and has taught writing in both tertiary institutions and community settings. She has outlived three husbands and has a number of grown-up children, foster-children and step-children as well as several step-grandchildren.Rosemary was a founder of the Melbourne Poets Union in the late 1970s, started a program of prison poetry workshops, and was part of a poetry theatre group called Word of Mouth. For a decade she was an independent publisher of Australian poetry, as proprietor of Abalone Press and part of the Pariah Press Cooperative. She taught Poetry Writing as part of professional writing courses at Holmesglen and Box Hill Colleges of TAFE in Melbourne, and at Victoria College, Toorak (Melbourne) which is now part of Deakin University.She founded, and for seven years facilitated the very successful WordsFlow writers' group at Pottsville Beach Neighbourhood Centre in far northern NSW, before handing it over to other facilitators who continued it a further three years. In its ten years of operation, a number of members had books published and two began and completed degrees in Professional Writing. Recently she has begun a new writers' group, also at PBNC. This is for women writers, as part of Pottsville Beach Village of Women (VOW). VOW Writers is one way in which VOW seeks to support and empower women survivors of various kinds of trauma, and encourage them to share their talents more widely.Rosemary has now embraced the online poetry world via blogging, twitter, and international poetry groups and communities. She is a staff member and feature writer at Poets United, an international community of blogging poets, and a sometime participant in other online poetic communities. She administers several poetry and micropoetry groups on facebook, and is a member of others. She is too busy nowadays to chase publication, but when invited (which she is glad still happens now and then) she publishes in both online and paper literary journals and anthologies. Her various blogs, both poetry and prose, can be found on her website at www.nissen-wade.com or by googling Rosemary Nissen-Wade. (The hyphenated surname ensures she's the only one!)Some free pdf chapbooks are available at her Google site: https://sites.google.com/site/rosemaryschapbooks/Her first two paperback books of poetry, UNIVERSE CAT and SMALL POEMS OF APRIL, are long out of print, but selections from each are included in her latest monograph, SECRET LEOPARD – of which only a few paperback copies remain, but SECRET LEOPARD is now published as an ebook and is available on Smashwords.Her work has also appeared in the collaboration, SHE TOO (with Helen Patrice, Delaina J. Miller and Leigh D.C. Spencer) in the chapbooks LIFE AFTER DEATH and THE IMAGINED OTHER (the latter in collaboration with Walt Wojtanik, Phillip Barker and Bruce Neidt) and in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her website has details of her non-Smashwords publications and how to acquire them. Most are also on her Amazon page (see 'Where to buy in print').THREE CYCLES OF THE MOON, a collaboration with her friends and fellow-poets Helen Patrice and Jennie Fraine, is available at Smashwords.Forthcoming at Smashwords is FOUND ON THE EDGE, a new collaboration with Helen Patrice, Jennie Fraine and Michele Brenton, planned for early 2020. Watch this space!

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