AustLit

'Fish Work brings the great barrier reef into poetic focus, exploring not just the fish that occupy the reefs but that vast variety of life-forms – including human – that make the reef a uniquely diverse environment. Developed over three years of field-work, during which time the poet lived and worked alongside marine researchers, Fish Work asks us to reconsider what it means to live with other beings, human and extra-than-human.

'Blending the language of scientific research with the language of popular culture and her familiar conversational register, Fish Work is unlike any other book of poetry currently available in Australia.

'This collection represents the first dedicated poetic investigation into the Great Barrier Reef in a time a climate change, paying particular attention to the far northern Great Barrier Reef, specifically Lizard Island Research Station where the poet spent several months over several years undergoing fieldwork with the scientific researchers in residence.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The poems in Maling's third collection, Fish Song, explore the effects of climate change in the Western Australian coastal sites of Cervantes and Grey. Maling's new work is rich and diversity, exploring physical landscapes as well as historical and socio-cultural aspects of place. The work takes her increased interest in ecopoetics and feminist poetics from Border Crossing and refashions her rural WA landscape in unique ways.' (Publication summary)

'Many decades after he had left Western Australia and settled in Suffolk, Randolph Stow would continue to be asked if he considered himself an Australian writer. In interviews, Stow would attempt to distance himself from ideas of roots, denying the label "Australian^ for his preferred "Anglo-Australian" ("A Conversation" 71). Similarly, Stow frames his interest in Western Australia as purely related to childhood, the town of Geraldton being the place where he just happened to grow up ("Mostly Private Letters" 354). Since Stow's death in 2010 interest in locating him on a cultural map of Australia has continued. With the re-release of his major fiction works through the Text Publishing Classics series in 2015 and the publication of Suzanne Falkiner's 2016 biography Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Stow is enjoying a resurgence, one that continues to try to locate him as an Australian or Western Australian writer. Yet as in his lifetime, Stow's poetry remains relatively critically neglected despite the most comprehensive selection of his poetry appearing in 2013 accompanied by an extensive introductory essay by John Kinsella. The Kinsella essay demonstrates how consideration of Australianness in Stow's poetry and prose almost always relates to consideration of landscape. Part of the confusion around assigning Stow a definitive designation as a Western Australian place writer must be that Stow does not write about place in any one way...' (Introduction)

'It was meant to be a story of a boy, a girl and a city – but time, grief and a relentless heart leave a mark that’s hard to wash off. '  (Introduction)