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'Jane Gibian’s poetry is remarkable for its clarity of perception and its sensitivity to the details and rhythms of life – whether in nature or in social routines. The poetry’s engagement is first and foremost with the natural environment, and with the contrast between the human engagement – with its extremes of fascination and despair – and the natural world itself, disinterested and unforgiving. The landscapes range from the coast to the forest, from rivers in urban settings to country towns and their surroundings. Their beauty is felt alongside their vulnerability to degradation. Throughout there is the awareness of connectedness, between people, places, seasons, animate and inanimate things – and the power of language to celebrate these connections, to register joy and constraint, and to draw on different kinds of reality. Later in the collection, Gibian’s poetry focuses on the passage of time and its vagaries, the ancient cycles of nature, the threat of change, personal histories, the fleeting moments of awareness captured in poems.'
Source : publisher's blurb
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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More Than Holding On : New Poetry by Jelena Dinić and Jane Gibian
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 441 2022; (p. 43-44)
— Review of In the Room with the She Wolf 2021 selected work poetry ; Beneath the Tree Line 2021 selected work poetry 'In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.’ Although far from improvisational, Dinić’s poetry compositionally integrates both fragility and strength as it draws together diverse experiences of war trauma, cultural displacement, the petty administrative routines of immigration departments, a Malaysian writing fellowship, Australian icons (such as the rainwater tank), folklore, and bathing in the Adriatic Sea.' (Publication summary) -
Jane Gibian : Beneath the Treeline; Amanda Anastasi : The Inheritors
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 16 2021;
— Review of Beneath the Tree Line 2021 selected work poetry ; The Inheritors 2021 selected work poetry'The author’s note which accompanies Jane Gibian’s Beneath the Tree Line begins by saying, “More and more I have become preoccupied with the natural world and our place in its increasingly precarious situation”. This together with the emphasis on those who will be stuck with our mess in Amanda Anastasi’s The Inheritors inevitably suggested their connection and a chance to round out, as it were, the emphases behind the books reviewed in my previous two posts. In fact, both books have more in them than an obsession with the cumulative toxic effects of the Anthropocene, Jane Gibian’s book, especially. Its five parts comprise five different perspectives on living which could be summarised, very crudely, as: living in the world, in language, in the digital age, the act of living in itself and living in the natural world.' (Introduction)
-
Jane Gibian : Beneath the Treeline; Amanda Anastasi : The Inheritors
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 16 2021;
— Review of Beneath the Tree Line 2021 selected work poetry ; The Inheritors 2021 selected work poetry'The author’s note which accompanies Jane Gibian’s Beneath the Tree Line begins by saying, “More and more I have become preoccupied with the natural world and our place in its increasingly precarious situation”. This together with the emphasis on those who will be stuck with our mess in Amanda Anastasi’s The Inheritors inevitably suggested their connection and a chance to round out, as it were, the emphases behind the books reviewed in my previous two posts. In fact, both books have more in them than an obsession with the cumulative toxic effects of the Anthropocene, Jane Gibian’s book, especially. Its five parts comprise five different perspectives on living which could be summarised, very crudely, as: living in the world, in language, in the digital age, the act of living in itself and living in the natural world.' (Introduction)
-
More Than Holding On : New Poetry by Jelena Dinić and Jane Gibian
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 441 2022; (p. 43-44)
— Review of In the Room with the She Wolf 2021 selected work poetry ; Beneath the Tree Line 2021 selected work poetry 'In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.’ Although far from improvisational, Dinić’s poetry compositionally integrates both fragility and strength as it draws together diverse experiences of war trauma, cultural displacement, the petty administrative routines of immigration departments, a Malaysian writing fellowship, Australian icons (such as the rainwater tank), folklore, and bathing in the Adriatic Sea.' (Publication summary)
