AustLit

'With each change of poetic clothes, at each moment, [Dawe] displays us ironically, satirically, good-humouredly to ourselves, with a warmth and sadness for humanity's follies.' - Thea Astley, Three Australian Writers

'Bruce Dawe is that rare phenomenon, a natural poet with a superlative feeling for language.' - Geoffrey Lehmann, The Bulletin

'...in him we have an individual and passionately perceptive writer whose work has already assumed its proper territory and whose terms are directed from the heart as well as the mind.' - Judith Wright, Poetry No. 4  ' (Publication summary)

'Melbourne Journal: Notebooks 1998-2003 is the third instalment in Alan Loney’s notebooks, covering the period in between his previous publications (Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976-1991 and Crankhandle: Notebooks June 2010–November 2013).

'Allowing observations and ideas to fall on to the page half formed, poems to shimmer into and out of existence like apparitions, Alan Loney’s Melbourne Journal celebrates the reflexive muscle of the poet’s mind, heightened by the stimuli of a new place: Melbourne.' (Publication summary)

'With poems ranging from the confessional to the mock-autobiographical, from imagism to a strange storytelling, from the comic and satirical to the plangent and disturbing, Star Struck startles us with the many faces of lyric poetry.

'This book of poems by the award-winning poet David McCooey is made up of four sections. The first documents an alienating encounter with a life-threatening illness. The second plays out an unforgettable obsession with darkness and light. The third brings together popular music and the ancient literary mode of the pastoral. In this highly original sequence we find, among other things, Bob Dylan singing Virgil, Joni Mitchell reflecting on life in Laurel Canyon, a lab monkey pondering the sound of music, and a bitter, surreal rewriting of ‘Down Under’ for our times. In the final section, narrative poetry is cast in an intensely new and uncanny light.' (Publication summary)

'Our Lady of the Fence Post is an imaginative response to news reports of the appearance of a Marian apparition on the construction site of a memorial for victims of the Bali bombing at Coogee, Sydney, in January 2003.

'One year after 9/11, terrorists had bombed Paddy’s Irish Pub and the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians. Within days of the report of the Marian apparition huge crowds started visiting the site, dubbed ‘Our Lady of the Fence Post’ by the press.

'Our Lady of the Fence Post tells the story of the ‘war on terror’, from the Bali bombing to ISIS suicide bombing in 2015, from the point of view of locals in the fictional setting of Sunshine Bay, in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs' (Publication summary)

'A Personal History of Vision expands on the concerns of Fischer’s acclaimed first collection Paths of Flight and embodies what Judith Beveridge has described as his ‘seemingly effortless ability to blend visual detail and imaginative vision.’ Intertwining the personal and the historical, the modern and the primeval, culture and nature, these poems explore vision in its many senses, often with reference to the visual arts. At their heart is a search for an enlarged awareness of ourselves and the world, in which the visible and the invisible, nature and spirit find one another. At the same time these poems are awake to inadequacies and the trials of death and suffering––personal, political, and ecological. Yet, even in the darkness (the focus of the second section) they detect possibilities of transformation.' (Publication summary)

'It is a little known fact that eleven African American convicts arrived in Australia on the First Fleet in 1788. Two of these ex-slaves were the author’s ancestors. In extensively researched poems, award-winning writer Judy Johnson vividly portrays scenes from her black forebears’ lives, both before transportation and afterwards, in the fledgling colony of New South Wales.' (Publication summary)

'From the intrigue of his earlier poetry in fatalism and the mysteries of character, Alan Gould’s interest has moved to music. In many of the poems in this book, the folk songs or the homages to Vaughan Williams, his enquiry is one of synaesthesia: What is it we see when we hear? In meditating this the poet prefers the crisp, accessible, narrative voice to the philosophical. Here are ballads and celebrations, homages to past authors who have been his spiritual companions – Graves, Yeats, Shakespeare, and tributes to the Finnish resistance to Soviet aggression in 1939. There are some ‘equivalents’ to popular folk songs, and the volume’s title poem, a commemoration of the extraordinary George Street dancer of VJ Day 1945.' (Publication summary)

'Rallying was written alongside Quinn Eades’s first book, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and before he began transitioning from female to male. A collection very much concerned with the body, and the ways in which we create and write under, around, without, and with children, this collection will resonate deeply with anyone who has tried to make creative work from underneath the weight of love. This is a collection of poems that are more than poems. They were written with children, under babies, around grief, amongst crumbs, on trains, with hope: with love. This is a book made of steel and honey, muscle and sun, with tongues. Open its pages and you will find more than poetry. You will find moments in time strung across by text, a poetics of the space between bodies, the way that language makes us separate and simultaneously whole.' (Publication summary)

'Praise for Snake Like Charms:

'Amanda Joy’s first full-scale book Snake Like Charms was five years in the making. It’s grounded deep in reality as are the snake cultures and legends it draws from. Amanda Joy is a poet from the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia, origin of the Rainbow Serpent, the Great Spirit that represents the world’s oldest religious tradition. According to Indigenous song-cycles, a snake literally created this country. These lines from the poem ‘Your Ground’ carry their wisdom lightly “snake says / be still / stand your ground / it's the only protection we have’.' (Publication summary)

'The collection is in two parts, with each one interrogating love, loss, gender and aesthetics. The poems refract these themes through personal experience, as well as through a broader cultural lens. Some of these works are direct responses to the act of reading literature. The hallmark of this collection is precision with language: these works are always present and vivid.' (Publication summary)

'The poems in this transnational, cosmopolitan collection traverse fourteen countries, from Australia, the poet’s homeland, to the United States, his place of residence, making stops in ancestral homelands Ireland and England, passing through continental Europe and the Middle East. O’Reilly’s poetry continually crosses both visible and invisible borders, excavating landscapes and the local, belonging and unbelonging, cross-cultural exchanges, expatriation, globalisation, exile, identity, youth, loss, relationships, ageing, and death. The speakers in the poems are often in motion or making preparations for departure, unwilling and unable to remain static, always eager to explore.' (Publication summary)

'Communists like us is simple love story, a little fiction told in a hundred poems, a hundred little places to live large, fragments of a story of love in a time of struggle. But then, when isn’t it a time of struggle? And when is a story not about love? And when isn’t love a fragmented but tender dialectic of the personal as political?

'This volume celebrates and explores the possibilities of political engagement in the midst of the very simple, the very human; an attempt at a confluence of dust and desire.' (Publication summary)

'From infancy to the last breath, David Adès turns a compassionate eye on humanity. He explores ambition, failure, love and loss with “the rich poverty of language.” – MIKE LADD

'This book, richly suffused with a personal metaphysics of light and dark, is an extraordinary meditation on the intricacies of affection and intimacy, loss and grief. Its graceful and eloquent poems possess a delicacy that might be written on the skin. –PAUL HETHERINGTON

'David Adès’ luminous and honest collection, Afloat in Light, is chiefly a celebration of fatherhood and of paying attention, utilising Simone Weil’s notion that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’. The collection extends to existence and loss, and a discourse on motive and meaning. Maps and moral compass are never far away in such explorations and like all good navigators Adès consults the moon and the stars to guide him through emotional terrain that crosses the globe via Australia, India and the United States. Poems about connection and love—familial, intimate, parental and friendship—hold their weight of history via scar tissue and heritage to allow ‘a vast and full space to fill the maps of our lives’. Afloat in Light delicately balances that most crucial aspect of life—of how the ordinary is anything but. Adès is a poet that fully harnesses the verve of small miracles. –LIBBY HART (Publication summary)

'Praise for Hush: a fugue

'Dominique Hecq writes through dulled topographies of mourning, avowing death is a “singular fear of finitude against a background of black light”. Autobiographical, and sharply particular, Hush takes readers into an abyss where “grief is a caesura” and loss means “being hostage to a ghost”. But this book is not only a poignant elegy to “losing your mother tongue and cracking your own voice”; Hush is also an incandescent lament from an “un / harmed” speaker locating the possibilities and lexicons of dénouement. Silencing the undertones of a surpassing grief, Hecq’s quest is finally epic and heroic.' –DAN DISNEY

'“Life goes on, they say,” says Dominique Hecq in her startling and moving new book of lined and prose poetry, Hush. Then, “Life goes on leaving.” A response to the death of a child, charting the near death and revival of a marriage and family, Hush is the lyric meditation of a true scholar, deeply inflected by theory but driven by the urgencies of the body. Early and late, it poses unanswerable questions—“Why is white white?”—and answers them by returning to the world of “Chalk, rice, zinc / / Crystal falls / / ” and, devastatingly, “Limestone graves,” before the language of the world disintegrates. Seeming at first to span a year of seasons, then suddenly encompassing fifteen years, the poem charts a remarkable inner journey, which begins in starvation, a refusal of the sensuous, but finally recollects not joy so much as presence. The world reemerges in water, birds, flowers, and most of all food, prepared at first as sacrifice, for others, until it makes itself present—first through color but also through smell, through sound, and literally through ink—and becomes the poet’s communion.' –KATHARINE COLES

'‘Munden’s vivid, well realised poems range across hemispheres and centuries, embracing music, art, film, historical events, and the potent catalysts of love, illness and death. In these pages our human frailties are apprehended with both a clear eye and a tender attentiveness.’ - Judy Johnson

'‘In Chromatic, Munden’s superb use of contrapuntal texture and accumulating melodies announce a fractured and injured reality, set against the visceral burn of passion. The rich musicality of these poems speaks eloquently of beauty and love, both physical and divine. The darker harmonies are often brilliantly jittery in their interwoven and compulsive juxtapositions, accentuating the poems’ silences and apertures. In Chromatic, Munden unlocks the musical performance inside his poems, and the result is transportive and rapturous.’ - Çassandra Atherton

'‘In this complex and intricately constructed volume, lyric poems address sometimes difficult, sometimes bewildering aspects of human existence head on, and in surprising and scintillating ways. Paul Munden tantalises and beguiles us with rich evocations of the mysterious and the opaque, reminding us of the strangeness of life and the mystery at the core of what we know.’ - Paul Hetherington' (Publication summary)

'Praise for The Tiny Museums

'This richly imagined and sensuous collection understands human longing. It vividly conjures childhood, and presents adulthood as a series of sometimes haunted negotiations between past and present. A number of poems also conjure dynamic visions of works of art. For Carolyn Abbs, apprehending the world is often a matter of seeing and touching what she knows. She addresses deep issues through making complex linguistic textures and evoking intimate poetic registers. PAUL HETHERINGTON

'Carolyn Abbs deftly creates the world of her book through a phenomenological approach. Elegant layers of textures, colours, sounds and movement invite the reader into numerous exchanges between the past and the present. In this way, her sensibility is painterly but it’s a Northern light in her poems reminiscent of the crisp mysteries of a Vermeer painting. Abbs’s poems dealing with family grief are centrepieces of the book and admirable in their ability to move the reader without overt sentimentality. Along with a skilled attentiveness to the ways in which sound moves through a line, this beautifully modulated emotional intelligence is a very great strength of her poetry. Via The Tiny Museums she bestows on her readers ‘a kind of overgrown underground’. LUCY DOUGAN' (Publication summary)

'Here are scrummed gangs of criminals and police, with all their lurks, quirks and argots. The underworld and its overlords: how ingenious and energetic, how ardent both sides can be. What brutes they can be too, day after day, as they track and trick each other, as they make and need each other. Ross Gibson’s poignant rewriting of a found dossier of police records has some Dickens, some Dostoevsky, and some DeLillo threaded through it. The sharp local language of Christina Stead, Kenneth Slessor, Arthur Stace and Ruth Park resounds in here too.' (Publication summary)

'Praise for Fingertip of the Tongue

'In Fingertip of the Tongue we find a poetry of close observation of people and everyday objects, finding in them new and deeper implications. These poems are sometimes whimsical, sometimes deeply personal, always satisfying. Sarah Rice displays a fascination with form and a great skill in finding the startlingly apt word, the evocative insight. Hers is a poetry of mind and heart. RON PRETTY' 

'Phillip Hall writes from the edge: the edge of language; the edge of mental illness; and, from the perspective of a non-Indigenous poet and teacher standing at the edge of Indigenous culture and community carrying generosity and love alongside the ongoing trauma of dispossession. This is a volume intensely interested in language and the self-care required in precarious lives.' (Publication summary)

"This deeply personal book is also an important historical record. Written from the heart and covering a period of time working on Christmas Island with asylum seekers until her return to Australia with an urgency to bear witness, Pettitt-Schipp's steady eye is levelled at a facade of Australian inclusivity and openness "this land's edge /has always been an invitation/a white-toothed smile/ to walk on". To those denied entry, those white teeth become menace, exclusion, shark, crocodile. In a book filled with heart-breakingly tender portraits, borders and bodies, sanctions and sanctuary are held close to each other in ways which articulate the space but also, the common ground between "us"."--Amanda Joy **"These beautiful Christmas Island poems capture both the despair of asylum seekers imprisoned by rock and sea and their ancient will to continue."--Gillian Triggs (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]' (Publication summary)

'Leni Shilton offers us a woman’s exploration of loss and survival in the unforgiving and beautiful landscape of central Australia. Bertha Strehlow, overshadowed by her anthropologist husband’s achievements, was a woman of integrity and a brilliant observer and connector of people in settings such as the Great Sandy Desert over many years of endurance. In this volume, Leni Shilton restores to her a voice.'  (Publication summary)

'Neilsen’s intelligent, searching, and relentlessly contemporary poems in Wildlife of Berlin reveal a poet whose chief interest is transforming and challenging the way we see our human position in a world under ecological and ideological threat. At once philosophical and conversational, deadly serious and unerringly wry, these poems offer us forensically clear-eyed perspectives on subjects ranging from environmental degradation and the impending collapse of fragile ecosystems in the anthropocene, to unconventional and irreverent portraits of figures drawn from literature and politics and beyond. Neilsen’s poems are miraculously both deeply ethical and deeply comic; they surprise and delight with the irreverence of their critiques, while always keeping an eye on the tragic consequences of human folly. Above all, they ask us to sit still, to pay attention, to re-examine our basic precepts with equal measures of reason, wit, imagination and empathy. Wildlife of Berlin is a superbly crafted, incisive and urgent collection of new work from one of Australia’s most original poets, and deserving of the wide audience I am sure it will find. These are necessary poems for incendiary times.

- Sarah Holland-Batt'  (Publication summary)

'Paul Hetherington has become a master of the prose poem form, creating intriguing yet hospitable pieces whose tonal, emotional and imaginative range are a delight. Each piece has been carefully wrought to become sharp and revelatory; his graceful cadences reach right into the heart of his subjects. This poet gives us substance, communion and an intense dialogue with the inner life. This is a superb collection.

—Judith Beveridge

'In Paul Hetherington’s Moonlight on Oleander things, places and human relationships become densely present in the process of being thought forward into ghostliness, through long and loving habit. Sequential without being narrative, consequential without the clincher of rhyme, Hetherington’s forms of words, gathered into blocks, seem like a new, telling version of sparseness, ‘unworded by exertion’ in the great tenderness the poet hints at, but will not overstate; in the links made between old worlds and new.

—Vahni Capildeo

'Paul Hetherington’s ‘shrine to the fragment’ is more than the sum of its parts. Here, details and incidents are seen anew, obliquely, renewed with precise words and a clarity of language and vision. This book is, indeed ‘a beauty that sits in the hand’, these poems composed ‘as if memory [was] a slow-burning furnace’.

—Rupert Loydell ' (Publication summary)

'Borrowing from the title of his Bruce Dawe prize-winning poem, Steve Armstrong’s wonderful first collection is ‘a cracked and weathered prayer’. These are questing, generous poems, filled with grace and vulnerability, and reading them is like taking a walk through a magical and yet familiar landscape, a walk haunted by memory, grief, longing and hope. Highly recommended.

– Lisa Brockwell

'The intimate territory Armstrong walks attends to the wider world—in particular, wild country, forest and field, river and ridge. But also the suburbs, the kitchen, the realms of the everyday. He writes the places in themselves, and he writes them as analogues, metaphors, for the geographies of the self. His is a poetry of landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss. Of delight and dilemma. He is a diviner. From the broken ground he draws the sacred.

– Mark Tredinnick' (Publisher's summary)

'This is an alive, refreshing and, quite literally, elemental book of water and skin, muscle and fire. Rachael Mead’s poems are immediate and grounded whilst entwined with fragility and struggle. They don’t shy from the difficulties and sadness as well as joy in human kinship. Along the way Mead offers us a clear-eyed self-consciousness of the human within the larger places of the earth, in this case places such as Antarctica, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, Ikara–Flinders Ranges. The book offers us an embodied sense of secular ritual in its attentiveness and its use of form – lists, lyric iterations, admonitions - as the poet both argues and confides with herself and us, about the wild pleasures of earth’s physical and emotional topographies, and of our responsibilities within all this. A powerful and invigorating book of journeys well worth taking.

'JILL JONES' 

'Ålvik – setting for the poems in this book – is a sleepy little industrial town, set between the Hardanger Fjord and its own little mountain for climbing. Behind Ålvik the serious mountains go on forever, all the length of Norway, till there’s almost no more north. 

'The town is brightly painted and decorated with laughter – a children’s town, if you remember. The artists and the poets, the singers, the musicians – they live in a fairytale house, where winter is always coming, even when it has arrived. But spring is pressing too, and summer is an open book, where the blue goes up forever and a day will never end. The forest is the poor man’s coat. Step in – let other worlds elapse. Read the leaves as they lie fallen. Follow the trail of light.'   (Publication summary)

'Malta—‘a slight blemish on the sea’s glaze’—forms the beating heart of Stone Mother Tongue, poems fired into existence by Annamaria Weldon’s experience of clambering over temples and monuments built by her ancestors. Now part of her psyche, they are melded with a wider experience of Australia as an ancient land. For Weldon, life is ‘all context and erasure’. When she writes of the masons knowing ‘which prayers to chant while hammering’, her poems entwine the land with a human history many thousands of years in the making.

- Kevin Brophy

'Meditative, delicate and restrained, these poems are nonetheless full of vivid realities: the ‘undersong’ of womanhood, family, loss, carob trees, wild rosemary, figs, geckoes, mother’s milk – and psychotropic chickpeas. Delving into her Maltese heritage, Annamaria Weldon shows us how the migrant’s encounter with Australia provokes a reinterpretation of ‘home’, a grappling with place of origin.

- Tracy Ryan'   (Publication summary)

'This impressive volume keeps the reader in its strong, yet tender, hold. The poems are poised, poignant and braced with feeling, especially grief and loss, but there is joy, too, and celebration, especially of family. In poem after poem, Julie Watts delivers many perspectives, but at all points the human, geographic and moral landscapes are convincing and real. She can dovetail inner and outer worlds effortlessly. Her poems are probing, investigative, yet always humane.

- Judith Beveridge

'This substantial volume is startling in its range: it encompasses elegies, love poems, descriptive pieces, poems of joy and of sorrow as Julie Watts ponders the legacies that form us through genetics and culture and that we in turn pass on. With considerable empathy and generosity of spirit she contemplates the old, the middle-aged and the young, the distant and near past, the present and the future, childhood’s imagination and adulthood’s sometimes tough reality. Identity for her is found in relation to others, in a world that is closely observed and closely imagined; life is a kind of music and she renders it with rhythmic and imagistic richness.

- Dennis Haskell'   (Publication summary)

'The final book in the Jam Tree Gully trilogy, Open Door continues Kinsella’s investigation into environmental responsibility and the complexity of our connection to the land of rural Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is a book of rare, complex beauty. Dearborn’s range is huge: from the mysteries and beauties of the molecular world to hard-earnt poems of family trauma, from complex love poems to a brilliant sequence based on the life of Virginia Woolf. Her miniatures – often small masterpieces – are built around deceptively simple but profound metaphors, the very bedrock of memorable poetry. Calmly intelligent on the surface, there is usually a fierce rip-tide beneath her work.

Peter Goldsworthy

'This is deep play at work – Dearborn’s intellect is displayed hand-in-hand with her remarkable ability to connect the disparate in entirely natural, surprising, and pleasurable ways.

Eileen Chong

'Dearborn’s trademark finely balanced, masterfully honed poems are vitally engaged with the world, and with our cycles of love and loss within it. Fans of hers will be delighted to find here the full-length versions of both her 22-poem sequence for the elements, ‘Autobiochemistry’, and the shorter but no less fabulous sequence on perimenopause, ‘The change: some notes from the field’. Dearborn understands that even a bald fact (scientific, medical, biographical), held and tilted just so in the right light, can sing with the resonance of dream. There are also nightmares here, as she deals deftly and devastatingly with childhood sexual trauma and the never-ending work of healing. A crucial and timely book.

Melinda Smith'   (Publication summary)

'From long narrative lines to fine-boned, lyrical loops and ties that bind these poems into place, Richard James Allen has taken risks with language that mark this as his most adventurous and significant book to date. --Anthony Lawrence

'Allen's subject is being itself, and the way our biological and mental dimensions interact, with human intelligence and love being the unifying forces for this interaction. --Adam Aitken' (Publication summary)