AustLit

'Departing from Virgil’s Eclogues, The Pastoraclasm is an urgent environmental address to humans, nature and vegetable gardens. During pandemic lockdowns, poet John Kinsella realised that he would have to garden not because he enjoys it but because his family, who live ‘in the bush, would need whatever he could grow. Fierce summers, fire danger, and only having access to rainwater tank water ― refusing to drain the aquifer further by using one of the two bores at ‘Jam Tree Gully’, reinforced the realisation that gardening needs to be a careful negotiation with the limitations of time, place and conditions of presence.

'What developed was a set of dialogues with the garden, and with the endemic plants and animals that surrounded it. Searching for a decolonising antipastoral ‘eclogue’, the poet continues his decades-long practice of investigating the nature of ‘pastoral’ and its failure to translate into the Australian environment/s.

'Writing to a poet in Wales, Kinsella said: ‘We’re in regional lockdown here, and trying to grow veggies in drought conditions. Lot of silvereyes, thornbills and gerygones out there today – overcast, which is unusual at the moment (still very hot), and that has them vigorous with hope, I guess... but no rain predicted. On emergency water supplies now.’

'In this cycle of eco-eclogues, a counter-pastoral of responsibility emerges – one that acknowledges the toxic impact of colonialism, and which seeks to address human rapacity through challenging consumerism and industrialism and offering an ‘alternative’ way of living. As garden and gardener, soul and self, all speak with each other, they are conscious of how close fire and other catastrophes are, and together they try to evoke a healing and a path through to justice for the biosphere. Known for his wide variety of poetic approaches and techniques, this collection is very much about utterance, place and a belief that there are no easy garden metaphors, that garden’s are also spaces of responsibility.' (Publication summary)

'Peter Papathanasiou’s parents emigrated from Greece to Australia in 1956 but were unable to have children, a huge sorrow (and shame) for them amongst Australia's Greek community. In 1973, Peter's mother's brother and sister-in-law in Greece offered to have another baby and give it to her to bring up as her own in Australia. Peter was that baby. This is where the story begins, with Peter's mother sitting him down to tell him about his birth and the sacrifice that lay behind it. What follows is a wonderful, moving and compelling memoir as Peter traces his parents' journey to Australia, their struggle as migrants, and the very different world that they came from—a world where the bond of family is so strong, a husband and wife are prepared to do something extraordinary for their sibling.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'She loved … and killed … both men and women. She was utterly beautiful and utterly mad. This is a tale of passionate horror … a breath-taking venture into abnormal psychology … a story which cannot be forgotten.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Salt Publishing 2014 reprint).

'There are very few major European poets of the early twentieth century not already known to English-language audiences, but Srecko Kosovel is one. Often called the Slovene Rimbaud (he died at twenty-two, leaving almost 1,000 poems), the full range and significance of his poetry has been revealed only slowly even to Slovenians themselves, and yet he is a major voice of Central European modernism, whose work explores powerfully and incisively the problems of individual identity and allegiance in the face of the new century with its strong call, to one living through the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to international socialism.

'Kosovel's poetry reflects at once the turmoil of the Balkans after the Great War and, at exactly the same time as Ungaretti, Joyce and Rilke were experiencing it, so deep a love of and connection to his native Karst region thet he turns it into aone of the most remarkable symbolic landscapes of twentieth century poetry.

'Although certain limited English selections of his work have appeared in the past, this edition, superbly translated by the poets Bert Pribac (Slovenia) and David Brooks (Australia), is the largest and most comprehensive selection to have appeared in any language other than his own.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Alison Croggon's bold new collection, Theatre, uses a range of narratives, fables, monologues and compressed lyrics to examine female identity and the idea of divine experience. Stepping confidently between different registers and a wide range of forms, Croggon's poetry shows a writer at the height of her powers narrating a female world of folk tales, trials, challenges, transgressions, and mythologies, where rites of passage are both linguistic, spiritual and political, and where persona is stripped back to an essential humility always journeying into fragile and impossibly beautiful worlds.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Space travel likened to a dream, pursued refugees, bikes 'ridden in a free-form dance with cars', Olympian exertion, and a crime whose solution involves global flight - these are some of the many forms of motion in Andrew Sant's tenth collection of poems. Set in Australia, China and Europe, the poems predominantly angle in on aspects of speed, a matter the French historian Marc Bloch considered the one particularly distinctive feature that distinguishes contemporary civilisation from those which preceded it. They include narratives, lyrics, dramatic monologues - diverse points of view with social and political dimensions.

'The other liberties of the title exist - often under pressure but whose boundaries are often broadened by wit - in recognisable rural and urban environments as well as in imagined places, for example in a playfully conceived banana's republic. Another is an island which has affinities with Robinson Crusoe's. The book also introduces for the first time Mr Habitat, a brisk character with a strong voice, who is nowhere at home yet in gutsy, colloquial language expresses his views and makes wry observations - often in tight urban situations.

'It is a collection that's verbally headlong, edgy and energetic, richly observant and wide-ranging, concluding with the celebratory poem 'Abundance', about bird and sea life off the Irish coast, and which suggests there is much to be gained from recognising that certain liberties exist at an irreversible cost.' (Publisher's blurb)