Finding Pan
POEMS
Jonathan Cant
Publication date
ISBN:
May
2026
978-1-923248-23-6
About the author
JONATHAN CANT is a writer, poet, musician, and educator. In 1990, while living in London, he met Beat
Generation figure Carolyn Cassady at her book signing and they struck up a friendship. Carolyn was impressed with his short stories and invited him to lunch where they discussed all things “Beat”: her late husband Neal, her late lover Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. This was a pivotal point in his life. Jonathan and Carolyn corresponded for several years. Beat influences can be found in poems such as "Audible Lines", "Go Go", and "Kirra Sunset".
Over the past 20 years, he has worked as a copywriter and creative director in the advertising and not-for-profit sectors. When he’s not writing, Jonathan enjoys travel, nature photography, cooking, playing guitar, and collecting vinyl records. He lives in Sydney.
About the book
Finding Pan is a journey of discovery. Throughout these poems, the recurring motifs of roads and rivers wind and flow like ever-present agents of change. This book offers a layered reading experience: as it simultaneously explores poetic forms and geographic places, traverses inner nature and Nature, itself, while slipping back and forth between the mythic and tangible worlds.
If the Greek god Pan were spirited into the world of contemporary Australian poetry, he’d surely relish this debut by Sydney-based poet, Jonathan Cant. With characteristic playfulness, Cant serves up a smorgasbord of poetic forms from the pantoum to the haibun to the sestina, across subjects ranging from inner-city shenanigans to greyhound racing to the perilous pleasures of long-distance driving. Notable for style as much as subject, these poems luxuriate in the elasticity of language, in wordplay and its potential for layered meanings and tonal shifts. Dare to reconnect with your own true nature, the poems seem to urge us—as Cant himself does, navigating a path through caustic wit to surprising tenderness.
—DENISE O’HAGAN
Intriguing, eclectic—Cant’s Finding Pan can inveigle, surprise & satisfy the reader regardless of whether the reader is new or an old friend of his work. Wear comfortable shoes reading Finding Pan, the serpentine trails of this book will see you far from the easy grade photo opportunities. But it is a journey that truly rewards the reader.
—LES WICKS
Rarely in contemporary Australian poetry do we find the English language put through its paces like it is in Finding Pan. Jonathan Cant just can’t resist wordplay, whether one of his delicious puns, anagrams, or an intricate form, often of his own invention. Language skills aside, this long-overdue first collection is full of poems that neither shy away from human failing nor resist the tender human heart.
—AUDREY MOLLOY