AustLit

'This volume opens with Keeps, a full-length book of new poems by LK Holt. Bound-in with it are her two prior books, Patience, Mutiny and Man Wolf Man.

'A hallmark of Holt's poetry has always been its continual refreshing of angles of vision. She has a dark skill with the unexpected image, and the thought that goes into an unexpected place. There is immediacy, even abruptness, amid her airy, crafted structures, and her music subsists in this.

'The keeps in the new book are of course the new poems themselves, which for Holt are essentially findings. Her impulse as a poet is to the retrieving of story, and the objects of the world that erupt from the midst of story. Her bent is at the same time lyrical, sometimes meeting the world afresh through contemplations of paintings, sculpture, and film, and always quietly touching on selfhood. The long, episodic suite, Stages of Balthazar, is about a donkey practitioner of instinctual acceptance. Followed and neglected by a Chorus as it can seem a self deserves Balthazar goes about his small village life, bearing a great love.

'By adding her prior two books to this volume, the Press intends not only to keep them in print, but to lay out for readers the fullness of the growth of an oeuvre. The poet has made some excisions and revisions.' (Publication summary)

'This volume opens with a full-length book of new poems by Petra White, A Hunger. Bound-in with it are her two prior books, The Simplified World and The Incoming Tide. The new poems of A Hunger are as lucid as they are mysterious: crafted for the ear, and for an emotional tone that can slip delicately between the mischievously ironic and a cut-through bleakness or joy. A strong theme at times is depression. As a poet she presses there beyond recording something personal into examining darkness itself, in a fierce art that deliberately gives and asks for no indulgence. The same goes for her love poems, in a sequence that plunges into the wild contradictions and poignancy of new love, with some glances to the Renaissance poets. White's poems inhabit life's essential fragility with a light-footed steadfastness. Her well-known 'Southbank', from her first book, is given a further turn in a new sequence, 'The Sound of Work': Petra White is one of the few contemporary poets to write convincingly about work in an office - indeed work in general. In adding her prior two books to this volume, the Press intends not only to keep them in print, but to lay out for readers the fullness of the growth of an oeuvre. She, the poet, has taken the opportunity to make a handful of excisions and revisions.' (Publication summary)

The title poem in Stone Postcard is a passionate drama that thinks through the close kinship of solace and trauma, something neither 'private nor public, and always waiting. The book as a whole moves with that spacious idea. The focus is intense, as you might expect. The tone, at the same time, is often laconic.

'There are two Parts. The first, starting with a birth and fractured family, has an intimate scope; the second carries questions of belonging out to wider horizons. Paul Magee’s variety takes in a policeman embracing an exploding man in Iraq, the international committee that met to recalibrate the metre in 1983, a keyhole view, a toddler at the beach, visits to an office of Employment Plus, and to New Jersey. Virgil’s detailed, horrific account of war’s chaos in the siege of Latium unfolds a nine-page climax to the book.' (Publication summary)

'This new work comes from a poet who has long made rich, intimate, lyrical and disturbing poetry about Melbourne's inner-northern urban streets and backyards, about memory and family, and more lately about the seemingly natural surrealism of the mind. Kevin Brophy is a master of tonality and nuance. ' (Publisher's blurb)

'Brook Emery's mode is enquiry, with a gentle insistence that enquiry matters. Fluent, occasionally epigrammatic, and showing a quiet humour, this is generous, open-minded poetry. As in previous collections, Emery's interest is in the intersections of the material, the spiritual and the rational. The poems are loosely addressed as letters to some implied correspondent, who might be real, the self or unconscious.

While Collusion is metaphysical in intent, the poems keep up a habit of sharp and tactile observation – the abstract becomes sensuous, and the intellectual makes friends with the physical. Swinging between affirmation and uncertainty, they weigh up the beauty and losses of the natural and human worlds.' (Publication summary)

'In Braiding the Voices, Peter Steele brings to bear a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching prose and poetry. With gusto and focus, these essays concert poets and poems of different tempers and aspirations. They are by Gwen Harwood, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Vincent Buckley and, further afield, Fleur Adcock, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, W.S. Merwin, Deborah Randall, Ben Belitt, Norman MacCaig, R.S. Thomas, P.J. Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The writing of some of his own poems is also addressed. Characteristically, Steele refers copiously also to much else. The book investigates some of the ways in which individual poets have found what they most wanted to say, and how their art takes its place in the general conversation of humanity itself. Applauding the dexterity and the variety with which this feat is carried off by the poets, Steele's distinctive prose is deliberately fashioned to be as hospitable to insight as possible' (Bookseller website www.readings.com.au/).

'Like Petra White’s applauded first collection, her second begins and ends with a fable of the uncanny ordinary. Between is a cornucopia of odes: epistolary, philosophical, elegiac. These poems think through and honour the normal mysteries of fate.

'Her world is large and contemporary, anchored by a young poet’s own memories. White inhabits her poems lightly, using personal experience with wit and without self-pleading. Some of this work shows the shadow of depression: not so much expressing moods as touching on how depression dwells, finding its register so it can speak.

'A number of poems openly engage with notable depressives of literary history, but we don’t need those homages to realise that this poet is a very capacious reader. It is there in her music. Late Lowell and Bishop, along with Harwood, ghost the swift edge in her language. Beyond these, a large tradition of cadences and tropes is absorbed in her fluent free verse lines.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'All but four of these poems by LK Holt are fourteen-liners: free-verse sonnets if you like—certainly lyrics, but somehow massive. They have elegance, terror, surprising imaginations, humour and extraordinarily disciplined thought. The darting variety that marked her prize-winning first collection has come to a steadier gaze in her second.

'A nut-shell account of the book’s four parts might describe a movement from familial well-being—happy-being—to a concluding psalmic sufferance, through reflections on the survival-feats of boys and men, on the self-presence of young women, and on love.

'That description catches her intimate touch but not her outreach. Holt’s writing shows how the present doesn’t escape the weight, or the light, of ancient narratives. History stands inside poems of contemporary dailiness, turning them to half-epic.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'David Musgrave’s poems are at once meditative and restless, elegant and sensual – with an energy of empathy that draws him to a wealth of subjects. They are in several kinds of free verse and formal constraint. Here is wit and melancholy in equal measure, with a dose of joyous satire thrown in.

'Waterscapes and landscapes figure strongly. Typically they move from the moment of observation to make transformative connections with emotional and imaginative states: the continual freshness of approach from one to another of these poems is a hallmark.

'Other poems meet human situations more immediately. The self, or some other, is substantiated with a generosity of feeling — and this becomes a startling quality within the strands of satire in some poems, notably ‘The Baby Boomers’. Generosity also drives — as much as an elegant form does — ‘Young Montaigne Goes Riding’. Those two extended poems are peaks in a book of exuberant curiosity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This third book is a radical departure in Morgan Yasbincek's poetry. A concentrated dialogue with the world around her, displayed in her first two books, gives way to poems that suggest aftermath and new beginning.

Their contemplations occur in the spaces left after loss, where love and grief are 'kinds of home without settlement'. They summon up the pluck and rapture of childhood, and the wisdom of religions: Buddhist, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, and a resilient and matriarchial animism.

The movement of voice here seems to rely on vacuum and echo for its definitions. The poems refract a spectrum of meanings, from inward directness, to inventive allegory. In the key poem 'gimel', the undulating gait of the white camel 'makes this direction into a future'. Yasbincek's own rhythms, as ever, are assured and light-syllabled.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The letter 'm' is emblematic of recurrence and precipitousness in these poems. They emerge with the wantonness of sensations in everyday life. In this case three lives: maternal grandmother, paternal great-great grandmother and the poet. Jordie Albiston, with characteristic delicacy and zest, limns these very different women as perspectives to each other.

Recurrence is intrinsic to sonnets. They are patterned internally, and are often paroxysmal: a perfect form and formation for poems which worry the distinction between the fatal and the banal.

The sequence tells what happens when you admit the existential into everyday life, in small or large doses. The results can be desolate, or sublime. And comedic as well: Albiston knows how to play between darkness and send-up, when it comes to an arduous and animating tension between body and mind.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Catherine Bateson's new poetry collection has at its centre three lively sequences that address the hard graft of spiritual negotiation. Imagined for present, past and future times, each of them tracks the slow and the sudden dissolution of love - yet love stories they are. Her characters are distinctly and originally conceived, with a habitual storyteller's craft.

'Fore and aft of these sequences are some poems that are more directly reflective. 'Marriage' is the familiar here - or at least the otherness of daughterhood, motherhood and being a lover. 'Beginners', it is suggested, is what we remain.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Pilbara alternates brief informative prose with bursts of magnificent free-verse lyric. O'Connor's gift is for bringing a large array of knowledge to bear in observations of delicate precision, combining awe with a quiet humour. The vastness of Western Australia's dry Pilbara is perceived in these poems, yet not allowed to dominate over its nooks and intimacies - the lives of birds, flowers, trees, and the unexpectedness of water.

'The 3.65 billion-year geological history of some of the oldest solidified land surfaces on our planet forms an underpinning. The work effortlessly takes in pre-history, history and ecology, along with current human realities like mining and grazing.' (From the publisher's website.)