AustLit

'The Garden of Earth is told in Thirty Five Books. Each canto is a long-breathed sentence that takes you in its flow. They gather all the hues of nature, history, culture and philosophy like metaphorical rivers gathering majestic detritus. It invites us to consider the plenitude of the world, but also how precious and precarious a thing this is. Homer Rieth's first epic Wimmera gave voice to the history, legend and folklore of the Wimmera region of north western Victoria, and to ideas of 'place' and 'country' not only as cultural markers, but as ciphers of an enduring mythos. In his new companion epic, he turns his gaze to the larger arena of the Murray Darling, to this oldest of continents more broadly. He offers a vision of the natural environment and the human world as bound together on a global scale. The Garden of Earth is a hymn to and argument in defence of the future of the planet. It is the poet's final assay of our age-old dream vision of the world, only here it is as something at once luminous and exceptionally Australian.' (Publication summary)

'Replacing the battles of heroes and gods with the struggle of mortal humans with time and space, Wimmera re-invents the epic. All the classical elements are there but they are now democratic, and ours. The narrator's anonymous informant knows a thing or two. Objective and personal, learned and demotic, local and vast, Wimmera is the history of a region and seedbed of a vision where 'the bunyip indeed lays down with the manticore.' There is nothing like it anywhere.' (Publication summary)

'This project has, for its central component, an epic poem, "A locale of the cosmos". The accompanying exegesis examines epic as an ancient, but continually evolving form. It argues that, as a contemporary example of the genre and, as a sustained poetic rumination on landscape and memory, "A locale of the cosmos" represents a significant development within the modern tradition of autobiographical epic.

'In broader terms, "A locale of the cosmos" privileges the landscape and history of a region of Australia, the Wimmera region of north-western Victoria and, in doing so, explores the cumulative effects of the physical environment as a site for sustained poetic treatment. The poem is, therefore, an epic of both historical narrative and philosophical reflection, giving meaning to and interpreting ideas of space, place and locale.

'Furthermore, it explores, in particular, the psychological and spiritual effects of vast horizontal distances, created by a landscape in which endless plains and immense horizons form an analogue of the wider cosmos. The poem's themes, therefore, bear not only on the prominences of the visible locale, but also explore the salients of an interior world, a landscape of the mind to which the poetry gives shape and meaning.' (Thesis abstract.)