Ian McFarlane considers poetry to be a conversation with the imagination of anyone prepared to listen. His verse is both free and rhythmic, spanning its own inclusive path. Ian is an award-winning writer of fiction, essays and book reviews. Despite the crippling handicap of anxiety and depression, he has used words and ideas in defence of social justice, the environment and psychological well-being for many years. He now lives in a Canberra retirement village with his wife, Mary.
Harnett Lane is Joshua Merten's debut collection of poetry, which speaks to a newfound intimacy with a city, grotesque and quietly vibrant. This distinctly contemporary portrait of Sydney distils a fragmented relationship with place. The work is strongly rooted in Joshua Merten's expatriate upbringing, and is an investigation of an Australian identity whittled into its most tiny, impermanent wonders.
'Who would not want to time-travel through the night sky? This is exactly what Carmel Summers offers us in her latest book Lost in the Pleiades. This is much more than a collection of verse - it is a compilation of careful poetic research into a cluster of stars that has fascinated humanity since its ¿rst discovery. Summers takes us through the present and mythological past in a journey of awe as it we learn to read star maps and explore the mysteries of the Pleiades. There is plenty of whimsical beauty in this collection. Venus photobombs the Seven Sisters. Joanna Lumley attends a hypothetical Javanese sacred dance. Galileo writes a treatise. We revisit a childhood fairy tale. This selection of poetry is Carmel Summers' best yet. She has a gift for choosing the most appropriate form for each poem and her writing is humorous, poignant, wildly exciting and always respectful. It's a must for every bookcase. Lost in the Pleiades twinkles with wonder like Jane Taylor's well known children's poem. I'm still hankering after that Seven Sisters bracelet with Orion's stone set in the middle!' - Hazel Hall, Australian poet and musicologist'Lost in the Pleiades by Carmel Summers is a stylistically diverse and meditative poetic exploration of the seven sister jewels in the night sky. She brings a feminist perspective to historical sources and mythological tales that have woven stories around the constellation of the Pleiades. From Galileo to the Australian First Peoples, we are taken on an historical and geographic journey that is yet deeply personal and reflective of contemporary life. We are invited to look heavenward to see "those lost girls glow and glitter" and to realise that "they shine to remind us - to love".' - Julie Thorndyke
David Horton was born in 1945 and grew up in Perth, WA. He graduated from UWA with Zoology Honours in 1965, aged twenty, then had a disastrous year at University of Melbourne, six good years at University of New England, an unhappy year in York, England, and then twenty-four very mixed years at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (first as an archaeologist, then as a not insignificant figure in Australian publishing, then as the creator of the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia). His research involved scincid lizards and biogeography (1966-1974); archaeozoology (sites from Cape York to SW Tasmania), Pleistocene occupation of Australia, Pleistocene extinctions, the role of fire in Australian ecosystems (1974 to 1984). He then ran Aboriginal Studies Press from 1984 to 1998. His major works include Recovering the Tracks (1991), The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia (both print and electronic,1994), and Aboriginal Australia (map, 1996). He gained a BA, MSc and two doctorates along the way plus major awards (most notably the prestigious NSW Premier's Literary Award 1995 Book of the Year 1994). After being forced to leave the institute, he published a book (The Pure State of Nature, 2000) on prehistory and ecology in Australia (notably considering the role of fire). He had also become a leading stud sheep breeder, and ran for federal parliament in the 2007 election. The following year saw the start of a run of bad health - a heart attack, then lymphoma developed in 2011 resulting in years of treatment, then a stroke in December 2020, then open heart surgery in February 2023. All of which he has survived. Married for fifty-four years ,with two daughters and three grandchildren, he lives in retirement on his farm in the southern tablelands of NSW, where he writes and builds his stamp collection and records frog calls.
Roundabout, life's journey, memories, and contemplation that rest on small shelves of my dreams. At times seem mundane yet somehow remain catalogued, until in the stutter of nights connect come selected through a sepia of drift. And so a roundabout of dreams interrupt my day, demand storage in folds of writing.
'Poetry has the ability to cover a lot of ground in a few lines, and Muriel Bergel's book deals with so many questions and conundrums. In these pages we find goddesses, dreams, music, mothers and even ugg boots. Mythology and the everyday are combined to great effect. This is a remarkably poised first collection, inviting us to travel with the poet as she navigates her way through loss, labyrinths and the art of kissing. Vivid images and memorable phrases will linger in the reader's mind.' - PS Cottier'Personal reveries free the spirit. Poems unfold memories, send postcards that weave a delicate web. Reveal ancient mythologies of love and sadness, "a cord still attaches us, I've tried to cut it but my scissors are rusty, so I keep coming back." Words caress family, lovers, nature, with a gentle kiss and release of "dandelion wishes". A beautiful collection.' - Jenni Nixon'In this debut collection, the world of spirits and nature flows alongside the domestic and the everyday. Muriel Bergel journeys through a maze of grief, yet is resuscitated by the startling energy of the "fiery orange blooms" of the marigolds, by gum trees, cicadas and dragonflies. Accompanied by the power of goddesses, she navigates through life, finding her way toward regeneration, renewal and new beginnings. As well, often light and playful, this satisfying collection is infused with vamos - a Spanish word meaning "let's go, come on".' - Jane Skelton
Vivid memories prompted by hearing a few stray notes playing sent me wandering through my very rich life to renew my love of particular pieces of music and songs. When I started writing poems, I recognised that, for me, music is like ekphrastic poetry. A composer responds to something and in turn there is my response to the composer. From my own experiences, I was reminded how my mental image or emotional response to a piece of music was not necessarily what the composer had in mind. Being more aware of the silences throughout a piece of music or when it comes to an end, I started to write about silence. In doing that, I realised that in our ordinary lives it doesn't exist. What is silence? It appears to be a momentary pause between one sound and the next - a heartbeat. Even if everything else can be blocked out, we can still feel or hear our own heart beating. Having got that far, I explored places where there was 'silence' and discovered what I could really hear.
Praise from reviewers of Ian Reid's previous booksRhumbs, Woods Hole, Mass. (USA), Pourboire Press'I like best his tough humorous approach and nearly epigrammatic style, his intelligence in using words and his width of focus - taking in not just the immediate situation but its context too. That's rare, now that so much verse is self-preoccupied, concentrating on the personal at the expense of thinking and feeling outwards, and without bringing up enough to justify the inwardness. Reid has always been able to relate in the opposite direction. To be humble and humorous about oneself is a lost art, but he has it. To look at the not-me with love and real interest and say something valid - Reid knows what poetry's for.' - Judith WrightUndercover agent, Adelaide, Adelaide University Union Press'Throughout Undercover Agent Reid places this uneasiness about living up to the Romantic ideal of man and poet insistently at the centre of his poetry, till we recognise in his procedure a dogged honesty. He becomes a keen and hard quester after what makes opportunities for poetry...a series of startling and versatile prose poems...an assured and authoritative syntax.' - Christopher Pollnitz in SoutherlyThe Shifting Shore, Grange Press (Vancouver, Canada) and Mattoid (Geelong)'There's a great deal of verbal flair, at times almost pyrotechnics, but the poems also have a terrific sense of place, of being located in a physical world inhabited by real people. All this gives the collection a human and physical solidity which is very appealing, and all the more because the language is full of tricks and surprises.' - Andrew Taylor'Reid approaches his subject with humour, precise imagery, and an emphasis on the aural... The poems discuss the self through extended metaphors so thoroughly that self and seashore merge, diverge and merge again. This is poetry of the littoral regions. In reading it one finds oneself standing on the physical, wet sand or in the conceptual territory of the individual psyche, depending on the tidal movements of each stanza and line... Not only a fine sense of the interstices between self and world, but an exceptional sense of imagery [moving] towards the fascinating territory that Reid calls "the ruffled edges of the real".' - Michael Wiley in Antipodes (USA)
Working in the Australian bush for almost forty years has brought forth from Tim Metcalf a robust, adaptable and independent poetry, the downside being that he is less known in the urban centres. This selection from his nine books aims to redress the situation and bring this wide-ranging and extensively published poet to broader attention.
'Kevin Densley's Please Feed the Macaws...I'm Feeling Too Indolent is lively as a string of firecrackers. Combining wry observations on the shortcomings of culture and politics with keen historical portraiture and a new kind of dense poetic squib - packed with a whole poem's charge in a few short lines - the collection crackles into life on every page. His vision is both broad and specific. Broad, when he focuses on the mythic figures that shape our world - Madonna and Child, Kate Kelly in her brothers' shadow, even Nosferatu winking from the wings - but specific in the small, delightful ways he brings them to life. Solemn-serious, building the early bridges, graceful as a cow with a cup of tea. Please Feed the Macaws is a collection that sighs, and rages, at the inanities of the world - then sets out to change them, one line and coruscating image at a time.' - James Roderick Burns
'Rockman's take me for tame introduces us to an emerging poet exploring identity, trauma and chaos. Passionate, confessional and resolute, with her outlook and inclinations laid bare, she seeks the kind of poetry that 'delivers a swift and potent punch'. Is she the Medusa she so admires? A mother, lover and She-Wolf combined? Whatever you decide you've no choice but to ask: Who is this new maverick poet?' - Nathan Curnow'What? No! Help! Here comes a new poet, right at me, right over the top of me, like a steamroller wearing dancing shoes. And all I can say is - Yes! Yes! And also - Help! The inexorable verve of this book! Whew! Shoshanna Rockman has mad skillz and a pocket full of firecrackers.' - Jennifer Compton
What some poetry prize judges say about John Bartlett's poetry:'This impressive poem works delightfully with rhythm, alliteration and imagery throughout. The relatively short lines work as delicate steps, just as fragile and testing as a heron's steps. "Survival' hinges on the word "despite' that concludes with a message of optimism: "the brooding hope...triumphant." In all, a masterly poem. - Judges report, the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize 2020'"Pilgrimages of the Short-finned Eel" was simple arresting writing. It made me curious to read and reread it. Wonderful images like "earthskin rupture', "the tremble-tremble, The Great Shuddering"; somehow these phrases created a sense of the enormous energy of the life force that brings eels to our rivers and years later sends them back to the Coral Sea to spawn, and there is much more meaning in that poem than I have time for here.' - Judge Josephine Clark in Mundaring Poetry Competition 2021
This collection of short stories - probably my last - is made up of remnants, snippets of dreams, of things that have happened and things that I have only imagined. Hopefully, together they make up a field of flowers even if the flowers are only made up of fabric.
'A Christmas Posy is a wonderful collection of haiku. A longing for Christmas is in these pages. We all have our own Christmas memories; the only difference is that it is summer and a kookaburra is laughing as in the song we sang in distant days. However, there may be another aspect to Christmas. Another Christmas story would be in the heart of the reader.' - Toshio Kimura, Professor of English, Nihon University, Tokyo
Frances Daggar Roberts is an Australian poet who grew up in a remote area where she began to write poetry to capture the love she felt for plants, animals and landscape. She lives with her partner in a bushland setting close to Sydney and now focuses on her art and poetry having retired from her psychology work at the end of 2022. As a psychologist, Frances was treating people with significant anxiety and depression. Compassion for those who struggle with such issues has led to the frequent exploration in her more recent poetry of human need, sorrow and resilience. Frances was also a teacher of English and languages and a former professional ballet dancer with the Australian ballet. She selected this range of poems because they significantly capture words and concepts that increased awareness of the many different perceptions that underwrites powerful contributions to the different inspirations in many ideas.
'Do not expect gentle rambles through the countryside. Beatriz Copello takes us on rough treks - through broken worlds, past "sleepwalkers trained to kill", "banquets of horror / tablecloth tinted in blood", "dolphins wrapped in plastic bags", "bats without trees" - challenging us to read briskly, urgently and breathe often. We are rewarded with times of love and with exquisite encounters with the numinous; we are offered tender hope. There are deep troughs and dark tunnels to navigate but with this highly acclaimed wordsmith we are drawn on by what the French philosopher Simone Weil calls "this something" In safe hands, we witness hollowness and hypocrisy and find our hunger is sated with the better angels of raw honesty. For us pilgrims, this is a searing and rewarding read.' - Colleen Keating'Copello wears her heart, her mind, her eyes plus anger & love on her sleeve. All in or nothing!' - Les Wicks'Beatriz Copello offers bold and inquisitive poems for our turbulent times. She speaks of the how, the why and the if of our relationship with our precious, corrupted planet. Circling through time and memory to have us protected by the "purple shawl" of a wisteria, moved by "the stories of the ancient past" and enriched by her sharp way of unravelling womanhood.' - Angela Costi
Light a fire of fear. A young woman stalked and raped by a police officer in a country town. Light a fire of anger. A journalist incensed by injustice on a journey to hunt down a fugitive. Light a fire of desire. One woman's quest to reconnect with a flame from the past. INCANDESCENCE.
'This collection blends candid and personal worlds, short stories, allegories and vignettes. The warmth of "Knight in Shining Chain Mail" moves to the chilling short story "Undertow", with its secrets, to heart-rending "The Broken Windmill". Decima does not shy away from reality, with all its twists and turns of family angst, defiant love, jealousy, betrayal, blackmail and the ache of the road not taken, balanced by the humour of light-hearted stories such as "Pop-up Author" and "Guest of Honour". The great strength of Decima's writing is her ability to hook the reader into a story. Her pared-back, often lyrical language keeps one involved until the denouement, one which often lingers long after the last full stop. I am still pondering "Burning Sixpence". What did I just experience? Enjoy a wonderful feast of language and ever-changing images.' - Colleen Keating
Unexpected challenges to my self-confidence and then reading The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli sent me on an exploration of time and memory. Rovelli took my understanding of time to pieces from a physics perspective and put it back together again from a philosophical one. I've been aware for years of those famous words of Descartes - 'I think, therefore I am.' Rovelli is saying something similar, that it is our memories that make us who we are. Rovelli says everything is made up of atoms and photons and more besides, and they are in constant motion - hence the term 'dancing dots'. I love the notion that a rock isn't rock-solid at all, but a mass of dancing dots. And if everything in the universe is made of dancing dots, what of our thoughts and our spirits?
'A love of nature and attention to detail clearly shine through.' - Les WicksPaul Williamson's earlier poetry collections are Edge of Southern Bright and A Hint of Eden.
Glass Kangaroo will take you across Australia, through time and places, sometimes from within the persona of a kangaroo. This is accessible poetry with a magical touch. Joe Pascoe lives in Ivanhoe, near Melbourne. In this collection, he is seeking to present a large metaphor for life and adventures in Australia, both new and old.
'In unaffected prose, Barry Revill takes us back to the Australia of his childhood, a time of simple pleasures and caring communities ready to heal each other's wounds. He shows us that, while some of the ties that bind drag us down, others offer liberation through the grace of small mercies.' - Paul Mitchell
When Luke Pomery was just nine years old, he and his older siblings, his mother and half-sister took an epic bus journey to his new home - a 450,000-acre sheep station outside Meekatharra, just south of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. There, the achingly hard work of helping to run a sheep station began. When Luke was twelve years old, he was sent to boarding school several hundred kilometres away. At sixteen, Luke was introduced to marijuana and by the time he turned eighteen, he was drinking and living on the fringes - until he decided to return to South Australia in 2002, when he was twenty-seven. Just six years later, Luke was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which prompted him to review his life. Lifestyle Choices is an engaging and inspirational story that chronicles the author's extraordinary journey and the challenges he has overcome.
Brushstrokes of the Mind brings together a collection of poems that spread the colour of nature and the psyche with light and shade; colour and monotone; form and abstract - like an artist's brush. In Barbara Gurney's fourth poetry collection, where hope follows melancholy, 'Roses of the Heart', 'Mellow Glow' and 'In the Moment' remind us that our lives are painted with many hues, and blue can turn to gold.
The sixteen short stories in Rock and Sea span an extraordinary range of mood and style. There are tales of tragedy, of mischief, of mystery and of gothic horror. Rock and Sea contains stories written by Jeanell Buckley over more than a decade, beginning in the late 1990s.
'Opus: a life with music is a stunning collection, beautifully written and withheld.' - Libby Sommer'"Through music, we can say what we didn't even know we felt." - Ed Le Brocq. What more powerful way to reflect on your journey of life than entwined with the memory of music. Exquisitely wrought, Opus gives us snapshots, sometimes softened, sometimes shocking but always honed and beautifully crafted, revealing a deep perception and intimacy as we have come to know of Pip Griffin's poetry.' - Colleen Keating'Pip Griffin's Opus is a gently written verse memoir of her childhood in New Zealand to her mature years in Australia. References to Chopin, Mahler, Gustav Holst, Elvis Presley and many others justify its subtitle, "a life with music". Touches of sadness, including her partner's death and her mother's thwarted dreams, balance the collection's positive tone. This is poetry to read over a few winter evenings by the fire or summer afternoons in the shade of a tree.' - Norm Neill
Early mornings, there's a busy twittering, singing, squawking from all sorts of birds as they start their day. Late at night, I hear the sighing of the surf and thumping of the waves on Coniston Beach in the middle distance, and frogs kero-kero-ing in the garden ponds. In between, are my adagio days.
'The undreamt, unborn horizon, the smack of the ocean beneath this brilliant collection, and in Pamela Leach a strong new voice beside us to navigate the thrilling risk of this voyage within!' - Dr Mark Macleod, Charles Sturt University'To read Unlikely Vessels is to embark upon, in the poet's own words, "a wonder-journey", to cross from known to unknown territories and back again. It is a quest to discover the meanings of the sea in lives both ordinary and extraordinary: migrants, pilots, ferry passengers, ship-breakers, deckhands. The waters are deep or shallow, clear or murky, benign or treacherous. Pamela Leach navigates with concentrated attention and lexical resourcefulness; her eye is caught along the way by the anomalous and the disconcerting. These are wise, penetrating and compassionate poems.' - Louise Oxley, Tasmanian poet'With a bright, engaged eye and wonderfully assured syntax, Pamela brings us a world of familiar detail re-voiced as cultural observation. By turns pragmatic and esoteric, there are no separations between body, boat, ocean, moon, and the horrors of deaths at sea and in poverty. Her work pulses with sonic power and a questing sense of the journey that is life.' - Esther Ottaway, Australian poet
On her very first day in Chile in 1985, a young Meredith Temple-Smith encountered a shrunken head at the home of the guide who was to lead a four-month zoological expedition to Patagonia. She was the only woman travelling with her new husband - a reproductive biologist - and three locals, two of whom spoke no English. In a culture outside her own, enduring often harsh physical conditions and engaging in the painstaking work of trapping and documentation of rare animals, she observed the group's changing relationships. Weaving her personal story with vivid details of the Patagonian journey, she explores her memories of being a young woman, and reflects on whether the resilience she acquired in her early adulthood strengthened her capacity to forge her successful academic career.
'Journal entries, poems, fragments, meditations. Allusions to and critical engagement with philosophers and writers - Chinese, European and Australian - this is what makes Ouyang Yu's Thought is Free a thinker's work, not a "thoughter's" who only has thoughts. Delightfully readable!' - Professor Prem Poddar, Vice-Chancellor of Darjeeling Hills University'This book is a treasure for those who are already familiar with Ouyang Yu's work spanning more than three decades. And if you are not familiar with his work, this is a welcome opportunity to get acquainted with his work and what shapes his writing and thinking. The book contains the thoughts of a writer who is one of the most nationally and internationally recognised Australian-Chinese writers of poetry and fiction in a hybrid narrative of inspirations, citations. It asks questions and provides tentative answers to what makes a writer tick, not least the commitment to writing and its accompanying delights and frustrations, and how they are shaped by living in a particular space at a particular time. A space simultaneously structured by nation/s, but also formed by the writer's own investment in place, even hesitant sense of community and belonging. It is wonderfully idiosyncratic as such books are, similar in my catalogue of reading to Fernando Pessoa's Disquietude, even if that was for a different place in a different time. Ouyang Yu's take is distinctly personal and bears the hallmark of his preoccupations as a writer, as an Australian-Chinese, and as a very human being who is, as we all should be at this moment of time, at peace and war with the world and its dis/orders.' - Lars Jensen, Roskilde University'Yu Ouyang's jaunty jottings are incredibly alive and bright and first-rate. This challenging book defies any intellectual effort to grasp thought.' - Bénédicte Letellier, University of Reunion Island'Enticing transpoeticnonfiction tag notwithstanding, Ouyang Yu's Thought is Free is a daring exercise at and assertion of authorial creative freedom by a born-poet and cross-cultural agent provocateur that not only resists discipline and genre categorisation, but unflinchingly defies the readers' power to pass judgements or expect translation of unknown Chinese words or references. Yet the depth of his reflections and the breadth of his transcultural erudition summon the reader to keep on board an intriguing trip down sour memory lane with a mature migrant poet that is "beyond prizes" and makes no qualms about giving Australia its due dose of bashing. Not that he shows much patience for celebrated Western thinkers whose universalist claims he defiantly contests as "preposterous". All in all, a nutritious crop of thoughtful fragments strung together into a book difficult to digest but worthy of plentiful "red underlining" awards from its readers.' - Aurora García Fernández
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