AustLit

'On February 7, 2009, following 12 years of drought, and on a day when temperatures soared to 45 degrees, bushfires burned across the state of Victoria. The fires, of unprecedented ferocity, killed 173 people, injured hundreds more, and a million animals perished in the flames as well. The fires reduced 3500 buildings, 2000 of them people’s homes, to char and rubble. One of the worst-affected areas was Central Gippsland, where the fire began in a eucalypt plantation outside the town of Churchill and burned through 26,000 hectares.'  (Introduction)

'An Open Book is the fifth book of poems published by David Malouf in the past decade or so, and it is perhaps not surprising that Malouf, now in his 80s, has returned to poetry rather than continuing to labour on novels. In one poem in this collection, “Sunday Afternoon”, he presents himself as a man whose life is in “Sunday mode. The mind / idling on automatic with no need / to be occupied or coloured, having come at last / to the end”. As this suggests, An Open Book is marked by an elegiac tone. Words such as “silence” and “breath” are common, and “blessèd” (diacritic intact) appears twice.' (Introduction)