AustLit

'“Barry Hill is a remarkable presence in Australian writing … I think of David Malouf, Judith Wright, and Les Murray as companion voices, for they too are writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and brilliant essayists steeped in European literature who are profoundly interested in Aboriginality …
[He is] a confident Australianist whose writing life has moved decisively towards Asia and the universal in recent years.”
Tom Griffiths
Introduction, Reason and Lovelessness:
Essays, Encounters, Reviews, 1980–2018'

'Since 1990, with Penguin’s publication of Raft, Barry Hill has been acclaimed for his poetry. His Ghosting William Buckley (Heinemann 1993), which won his first Premier’s Award, was described by Overland’s Barrett Reid as a ‘major work’. David Malouf wrote that The Inland Sea (Penguin 2001) was ‘a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism’. Necessity: Poems 1996–2006 won the ACT Judith Wright Award. Lines for Birds (2011), a collaboration with the artist John Wolseley, was commended for the Prime Minister’s Prize, and described by Nathaniel Tarn as ‘a miraculous gift of a book’. His Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud (2012), which John Kinsella described as ‘a masterpiece’, was short-listed for the 2013 UK Forward Prize, and prompted Sebastian Smee to declare him ‘a superb poet’ … His Selected Poems was published last year. Kind Fire is his eleventh collection.

'Beloved Historian at Home
For the late Hugh Stretton and Patsy Stretton
He cannot remember a line of his great works
or my name, but most days he locates his toothbrush.
And he can, still, turn to his wife
who finds him there in his well of love.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Barry Hill's tenth book of poetry selects from his Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, 2013, and described by John Kinsella as a 'masterpiece'; Grass Hut Work (2016), his excursion into Hiroshima and Japanese poetry, which Sam Hamill said was 'beautiful and quietly powerful'; Lines for Birds (2011) his collaboration with the painter John Wolseley, was acclaimed by Nathaniel Tarn as 'a miraculous gift of a book'; The Inland Sea (2001), which David Malouf described as 'a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism'; Ghosting William Buckley (1993), deemed by Barrett Reid a 'major work' of 'stories, thought and music' from the encounter of a 'wild white man' and the indigenous people of the Australian frontier. This Selected also includes recent poetry--lyrical, political and in memoriam.' (Publication summary)

'‘This wonderful, mysterious and compelling collection of essays prompts us to consider Barry Hill’s unusual place in Australian letters…The essays are like jewels in a necklace, each glistening with its own beauty but together making something of greater elegance.’ 
—Tom Griffiths

'‘A rich gift. Thirty two invitations to share the speculative adventures, in friendships, in family, in the world of politics and moral and spiritual commitment, of “a man in his wholeness, wholly attending”. An extraordinary revelation of the considered life.’ 
—David Malouf

'‘Reason, as passionate analysis and the higher Reason of moral law, runs through this astonishing collection of essays as a lifeline cast to us in a loveless world bereft of justice. At last we have the proper lens for getting Barry Hill into focus: so varied and extensive is his accomplishment as a writer—in poetry, fiction, social and cultural history, and criticism—that we need this book to gather together in one place an adequate reflection of all that achievement. This is “Man Thinking”, in Emerson’s phrase—the work of a finely honed intellect and a capacious spirit—that educates us in the full range of our humanity. Like DH Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and John Berger—all of whom he writes about cogently—Hill shows how a life of writing is a life of thinking, when both the mind and the heart are animated by love and by reason.’ 
—Paul Kane , Vassar College

'‘These are intimate, stylish essays. This collection showcases Barry Hill’s remarkable intellectual curiosity and erudition. From questions of belonging and attachment, to global challenges of survival, belief and knowledge, Barry unflinchingly pushes through new frontiers to reveal, with passion and precision, new ways of seeing and feeling.’ 
—Julianne Schultz , Griffith Review (Publication summary)

'I rarely feel calm and good,' Christina Stead wrote to a friend in 1967, just five years before she came back to face the old music in Australia: the cultural cringing she scorned; the family oppression and animus she'd long fled from; the 'raw, fresh and unhistorical society'. Her garrulous letters of this period are, however, calmer than they'd ever been: less flighty, impressionistic, less strained in their praise and courtesies towards others-less self-conscious, I suppose, than they were before her literary reputation built its solid foundations. But there was still that unfinished novel around her neck that was to be called I'm Dying Laughing-one of her several ironic titles, which was published posthumously in 1986. She saw it as 'full of anguish'. It would take a lot more work. She knew what she wanted to say. But that would involve 'cutting down the excitement and drama and conflict'. (Introduction)

'Coetzee the critic is every bit as good as Coetzee the novelist,” the Irish Times said of his third essay collection back in 2001. For Late Essays: 2006-201/7 (Knopf Australia; $29.99), his fifth, his publishers use the blurb again, and no one should argue with the praise.' (Introduction)

'The Last Man in Europe, a lean novel of artful mimicry, was the working title of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four before it was published in 1949. Melbourne writer and political adviser Dennis Glover seems to have absorbed all Orwell was and yearned to be by the time he came to the ordeal of his final, invalid years spent writing  that  last  word  on  our  political future.' (Introduction)