AustLit

'Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan’s most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.

'A precise language of environmental observation is braided into stories of family and kin networks. Careful descriptions of place anchor this collection in ecological watchfulness. Birds are sentinel to environmental change, and symbols of spiritual transformation. Song in the Grass includes over sixty different species of endemic or migratory Australian birds.

'Archival practices of all kinds ― what one poem describes as 'a lyrical index' ― offer touchstones for this sonically rich collection, in which poetry becomes a way of sustaining love over distance, a collective music, and a compass for navigating in-common emergencies.' (Publication summary)

'On 26 March 2021, in a window between lockdowns, author and filmmaker Miro Bilbrough and I met to discuss her free-wheeling memoir, In the Time of the Manaroans (Ultimo Press, 2021). The conversation transcribed here was shared with a wide audience via Zoom as part of the online ‘Room to Listen’ seminar series, hosted in Parramatta by the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. I now invite you to read, listen and absorb Miro’s flair for poetic storying.'  (Introduction)

'In my poetry writing workshops I often teach ‘Wild Flowers’, a stunning poem by Yankunytjatjara author Ali Cobby Eckermann. Several years ago, my first-year students at Western Sydney University were reading ‘Wild Flowers’ alongside ‘Rise Again’ by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish. One student offered an electrifying reading of Eckermann’s poem that I’ve never forgotten. He began by recalling a trip to Beirut he’d made as a young adult, long after leaving the city as a child and migrating with his family to Western Sydney. How did the city appear to you, I asked? The same, he deadpanned, with more bullet holes.' (Introduction)

'For experimental poet and jazz drummer Clark Coolidge, words are never impressions. They are sonic inscriptions, vectors, movable actualities. They alter by degrees in the company of others and in time. I started with Coolidge for many reasons; first among them, his stellar understanding of improvisation.' (Introduction)