AustLit

'Diane Fahey’s November Journal is a sequence of one hundred tanka offering glimpses of the glorious beauty of the landscape around Bundanon in New South Wales. Far from meditative, the lively sequence belies any notion that the bush is quiet and serene: all is activity, bustle, and business as usual for the furred, feathered, and scaled inhabitants of the area. Thus, she describes a vibrant landscape in “Clouds” as a “scene of growth, pulse” (47). These are painterly poems appealing primarily to the sense of sight but they are also consonant with the sounds of the countryside. Fahey has a rare gift for musicality as well as imagery.' (Introduction)

'The Sky Runs Right through Us, by the award-winning poet Reneé Pettitt-Schipp, traces a journey from Christmas Island, where she taught asylum-seekers, to the Australian mainland where she cared for her dying father, then to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and to suburban Perth. Of course, the politically-charged poems form a major part of this collection but they are in dialogue with the poems that speak of her father’s decline so that this collection feels quite cohesive.'  (Introduction)

'Wildlife of Berlin is Philip Neilsen’s sixth collection of poetry and his veteran experience shows in these superbly-crafted poems about the human / animal interface. Ecopoetics can tend towards the didactic, the maudlin, or the elegiac in response to what seems a dire future. Neilsen’s poems, however, offer redemptive hope for humankind if only we act on the knowledge that our destiny is inextricably bound together with nature’s fate.' (Publication summary)