Lime Green Chair is a collection of poems prompted by a mix of real-life episodes in Melbourne and Sydney, dreams and constructions from curious fragments of language. They range in tone from the comic to the elegiac, and in form from the 231-syllable ‘expanded sonnets’ of parts I and III to the ‘short-story’ poems of part II.
"The poems in Chris Andrews's Lime Green Chair... are luminous, artificial interior worlds in which we wander (as in the church of 'Summits, Hangars' where 'a smooth cavity of flesh-worn stone / loses the warmth of the day's last hand'), or from which we are invited to peer out... His poems are hightension affairs... Relying heavily on a twenty-one-line form, with a 'volta' after the thirteenth, Andrews achieves memorable effects... Chris Andrews's poems seldom sing, are essentially flightless, but they have an almighty kick and can wake us up to both the unexpected and the obvious: Sounds that came into the world in my lifetime already sound old-fangled: dial-up modems, the implosion of a television tube in a set dropped from a high window..."
John Greening, TLS
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia in 1962, and grew up in Melbourne. His previous poetry collection, Cut Lunch (2002), won the Anne Elder Poetry Prize (2003) and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize (2004). His translations of Latin American fiction include Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (2003) and César Aira’s Varamo (2012). In 2005 he was awarded the Vallé-Inclan Prize for Literary Translation by the British Society of Authors. From 2002 to 2010 he reviewed Spanish and Latin American books for the TLS. He now lives in Sydney.