AustLit

'Izzy Roberts-Orr's debut collection Raw Salt explores contemporary elegy and writing the environment—excavating and engaging death and its aftermath, lineages both ancestral and intellectual. Responding to the sudden death of Roberts-Orr's father a decade ago, Raw Salt is a work of mourning and memory, healing and consilience. The collection is raw with lived experience, the complex history and inheritance we each receive with the death of a parent. The ongoing presence of her father, a horticulturalist, shines through Roberts-Orr's deep attention to the natural world, rendered in poems of extraordinary clarity and precision, offering a kind of healing we might all attend. A complex and deeply human work, this debut collection explores with nuance and generosity the darker undercurrents, the cycles of growth, decay and destruction, sustaining us and the ecosystems from which we have evolved and, as with the departed, are always a part. Izzy Roberts-Orr's Raw Salt introduces a remarkable new voice to Australian poetry.' (Publication summary)

'Technically expert and purposefully experimental, Three Books continues Holt's long interrogation of the lyric form, and of the language, the roles, and the conventions we find and lose ourselves in. This substantial and significant new collection is formed from three volumes of poetry that stand independent, yet also reverberate as one. The first volume, 'Merry War (of never meeting and never ending)' comprises Holt's loose versions of the love poems of Jahan Malek Khatun (a female contemporary of Hafez) and the Roman poet Catullus. Their poems alternate, in parallel, upon the same atemporal plane of expression and desire-they never meet, but beside each other they become the receiver for the other's invocations. The second volume, 'Nina in the Hag Mask', consists of poems and suites within a tonal loop-modern structures for housing the primitive Uncanny, the fears and anxieties that are our birthright. The final volume, 'April', is a long prose poem, sounding out the ways in which a self possesses time and language, and vice versa. Long-term readers of LK Holt will see in Three Books the further evolution of one of Australia's most formidable and ambitious poets.' (Publication summary)

'Polyp, named after the coral's tentacular polyp, is Ashley Haywood's highly anticipated debut collection of poetry. Drawing upon paleologist and geologist Dorothy Hill's collected papers for inspiration, Polyp explores corals, fossils, seeds; tracing out the I of the poems through strata, deep-time, and the Anthropocene with urgency, compassion and the kind of anxiety that spurs action. This remarkable livre compose seeks the ineffable in the loops and flows of ecological and geological systems, as well as through its own linguistic formalities and experimentations. Polyp grows from itself like fractal shoots, then snips its feet to create new forms. A wild I slips between layers on the page, desirous of multiplicities, time-fullness and connection, looking back to ask, Who's there? What poem are you? Exquisitely rendered through fragmentation and recombination, Haywood's debut collection offers a vital and nuanced reinvigoration of ecopoetics, raising the questions for each of us, 'What have I done, what haven't I done?' (Publication summary) 

'Google is our friend, our guide and our priest. With 8.5 billion Google searches everyday, 99,000 happening right this second, we are a symphony of the stressed and self-pitying, constantly asking for validation and reassurance. This collection is what it means to be alive today even if it’s, Where will my money go if I have no family? or Ed Sheeran hair.

'Genre-defying, raucous and elliptical, Search Histories is a collection of short (short) prose about what people google in a specific time of their lives, however significant or mundane. Epigrammatic, wicked, and hilarious, composed only of what people might have typed into Google, this book is a look at our fears, existential wonders, suffering and inconsequential streams of consciousness. This collection of vignettes shows just how boring but funny the monotony of everyday life is through characters dealing with identity struggle, loneliness, burnout, financial stress, strained relationships, spiralling worry, sadness and desperation. Search Histories is all about humanity’s insecurities, Do chicks like dudes in leather jackets, curiosities, pics of boobs women, and vulnerabilities, Has anyone else said sorry to a chair leg before reddit. In a time of capitalising on our hobbies and incessant self-curation, private Google searches are perhaps the closest we get to a real portrayal of a person. Mostly funny, at times sad because it’s true, Search Histories shows that people today are chronic overthinkers desperately hunting for the answers to: Who am I and is it ok?' (Publication summary)

'Luminous and profound, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is the eleventh collection of poetry from one of Australia’s most respected and celebrated contemporary poets and translators. Over five sections, Boyle offers a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to be human, moving from the personal to the social and political, from the immediacy of the writer’s home to a traveller on a train to Shanghai or a French pianist performing Ravel, as seen on YouTube. This mingling of inner and outer realms continues in dream narratives that sit alongside political poems, such as ‘Our World’, and final haiku-like poems that return us to the vision of our small place in a world filled with other-than-human presences. This is a work of deep imagination and subtle humour, a generous sharing in the sometimes magical, sometimes uncertain and unsettling experience of being human.'(Publication summary)

'Deftly working across both verse and visual poetry, Skilbeck-Porter gathers aesthetic experience and layers thought and memory, structuring the collection through the central motif of the municipal swimming pool, where fragments of thought and observation swim and float to the surface. Observational, attentive, and at times surreal, Skilbeck-Porter’s work immerses the reader in a sensory experience that delights the eye and the mind. These Are Different Waters is the first iteration of what Skilbeck-Porter terms a ‘poetics of no division,’ where everything is permitted and boundaries are traversed, emphasising interrelatedness and fluidity without hierarchy. It is a sublime and accomplished debut from a poet who has been working in concrete and verse poetry for over a decade.

'Conceptual, droll and formally experimental, These Are Different Waters disposes its wide-ranging materials into an elegant two-part structure: ‘Inflatable pool’, and the substantial visual sequence, ‘Concrete Pool’. Skilbeck-Porter dares to devise her own weird syntax of hallucinatory profusion, a through-composed ‘ink spell’ of restless, post-Steinian parataxis. Decisive and yet dreamy, its poetic bricolage, ‘a stratosphere of shifting surfaces’, resists closure and passes the baton: ‘The end of my swim, the beginning of yours’. Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award Judges' (Publication summary)

'The Argonautica Inlandica is primarily based on the ancient Greek text/translation of Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, with other ancient texts including Pindar’s Pythian Odes and Valerius Flaccus’s Latin work, Argonautica. In loosely following the journey of Jason and the Argonauts. The Argonautica Inlandica re-envisions a key story of Western literature in terms of environmental poetics and an examination of colonial impacts. Integrally connected with Kinsella's ongoing examination of south-western Australian ‘nature reserves’, The Argonautica Inlandica takes the sea journey inland via rivers and creeks, into spaces of ‘nature’ that have managed to persist despite the ecological destruction of vast areas of southern Western Australia. The journeys are many, however, a set of voyages of de-exploration and de-colonising activism. The Argonautica Inlandica is fundamentally an ecological work that examines the settler impact on country, and industrial impacts on world environments, and laments the rapacity and greed of a consumer world that has left so much of the natural environment in a vulnerable or in fact devastated condition. However, the tone is ultimately affirming insofar as action to halt the damage — including through the writing of poetry — is seen as a partial way of correction, healing and redress. The Argonautica Inlandica is a masterwork from one of contemporary poetry's major voices.

'‘In searching for the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts experienced harrowing trips through the uncharted rivers of central Europe and the desert wastes of North Africa. Now, in his brilliantly conceived and dazzlingly erudite ecological epic, John Kinsella turns Apollonius of Rhodes’s great water journey inland and inside-out, revealing how in Australia “the quest for metals to service the greenwash / of energy, the lap against the balance of power hull, / is the death of a forest and its inhabitants. And that’s real /-politic, sports funding, local investment, and PR.” Indeed, “The clash—rigor/ mortis of empire craving, and the media’s / feeding frenzy” leave both poet and reader to witness “insect and reptile sheltering places / removed, echidna hollows disturbed,/ ground exposed raw as some properties /surrounding the enclave, hemming / it in.  And the phantom travellers, / antithetical Argonauts, look on with despair . . .”'(Publication summary)

'Riverbed Sky Songs is an admiration and imagining of the inherent links between ecosystems and the human experience. The poetry collection challenges colonial form and storytelling and is tenderly woven across the page to mirror Wae’s connection to Country; found in moments of enamour amidst soft pockets of moss at the edge of a riverbed, in the reminder of strength and of spirit as reflected in the surface of a pearl, to the ancestral songs and knowing that are passed on through blood. It is an ode to the legacy of labour, power, courage and love of writers before us, and an offering of an ember to our children who will keep the fires of care and culture burning. Riverbed Sky Songs is a transformative process of discovery that enacts as a reminder to return, to walk gently, and to listen with as great a depth as the seabed alongside which many of these poems were remembered and recalled.' (Publication summary)

'Time Machines is the debut collection of poetry from Australian poet Caroline Williamson. At once acerbic and generously hearted, Williamson's poems carefully shape and form the everyday and personal into a meditation on the economic and political systems and the personalities that govern us. Through finely wrought narrative poems, Williamson vividly renders contemporary Melbourne in all its life as these same systems buckle and strain under the pandemic, the evolving climate catastrophe, and the hubris and incompetence of our political leaders. Williamson's poetry deftly and unapologetically, with insight and heart, explores while the personal is political, the political is also personal, holding the forces and individuals that govern us to account. This long-awaited debut collection brings a vital new voice to contemporary Australian poetry.' (Publication summary)

'Powell’s new poetry collection is a study of a fantasist, stuck between the everyday and imagined worlds, between small moments and monstrous cities. Gentle Creatures puts a new shine on the domestic. This is a different way of looking at the world. It is a book of intersections. The past speaks to a possible future, married people speak wordlessly in airconditioned rooms, a fat girl is becoming furniture. Cities are turning into trees and weeds, there are dreams of going to Chinatown with old lovers. There are suburbs, freeways, country towns with wide crossroads. There is danger and joy. In Gentle Creatures, Powell reveals the private and unspoken in the hope of finding a common experience with the reader. It is a deep dive into the part of her brain where the gentle creatures live. She is in search of the second skin of the everyday, making her way through sex, the body, girlhood, nature, family and new marriage. Written just after returning home to Melbourne after a decade overseas, these poems also represent the longing and uncertainty of displacement, the feeling in your bones when you know it is time to come home. The newness and trepidation of when you finally get there. Told in two movements, Gentle Creatures and Birthday Dresses, this is a collection of textures and tastes, creating a world where the mundane glitters and the past aches from the room next door.' (Publication summary)

'Shouldering Pine is a book-length nature poem that is also a critical meditation on the pastoral. Specifically, the concept of the natural world as inherently calming or peaceful. It interweaves the anxieties of the personal and immediate with those of the collective and long-term. The book touches on general anxiety disorder, grief, climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. It is written in a minimalist fashion and can be consumed in one sitting. The idea is for the reader to feel out of breath, but for the experience to be over relatively quickly, like a panic attack. Alternatively, the reader can dip in and out as though each page is an individual poem. Importantly, the speaker’s trauma is never explicitly stated: alluding to the difficulty in finding anxiety’s source and pushing back against what’s been identified as ‘trauma porn’. Human, open and wise, Shouldering Pine is unique in contemporary Australian poetry for its understated virtuosity, humour and relentless clarity.' (Publication summary)

'In her long-awaited debut collection, Holly Isemonger, engages, pulls apart, and ingeniously reassembles our language to surprising, ingenious ends. Despite the formal innovation there is nothing cold or dry about this collection: it is funny and sad, biting and wrenching, immediate and tender. These poems are excursions which incorporate both the communal and the deeply personal. If they are ‘experimental’, then they are experiments from the heart. Isemonger’s work is irreverent, never boring, always buffered by exquisite sensibility, style and form. Greatest Hit is a stunning and highly anticipated debut by the winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In Travelling Among the Stars, one of Australia’s best-known poets, Peter Skrzynecki, ranges across the course of his life, gathering recurrent images and memories, places and moments into a whole. The title of the collection is from ‘Epitaph’ the last poem, written in response to a moment of satori on the tarmac at Sydney airport. Skrzynecki’s poetry emerges from the natural world, from a lifetime moving back and forward across New England, the landscape inhabiting him as much as he inhabits it. These poems give the shape of a life looked back on, traces the cycle of seasons, the cycle of the years, the simple lived truths of growing up and growing old. The realization of the roles of parents in one’s life and the awareness of ageing in one’s own body run through the collection, and alongside them an acceptance for the impermanence of things. Family, nature, spirituality, the elements and seasons, and dreams co-mingle, pass by and return – culminating in acceptance and submission to a force beyond the tangible and visible, the light in the darkness before the first bird sings. From one of Australia’s best-known poets, Travelling Among the Stars offers a summation of a life lived devoted to poetry and bears witness to the impermanence at the heart of wonder and the simple daily awe of being human.' (Publication summary)

'A fine-tuned book-length assemblage of dispersed ‘cerebral offcuts’, virtuosically inventing ‘the shape of a mood’. Nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual: ‘following some line’ of ‘live consciousness’, ‘inner in outer’, ‘what’s around’. Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax. Condensed, sharp pops of resonant fragments create their own fresh textures and juxtapositions.

'The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2021 judges (Kate Lilley, Pam Brown and Melinda Bufton) praised Running Time as 'nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual ... Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax.' (Publication summary)

'A Gamble for my Daughter takes its title from the final poem in Luke Fischer’s third full-length collection, which addresses the dilemmas of raising a child in a world fraught with political unrest and environmental catastrophe. This contemporary situation is historically contextualised by other poems in the collection, including the five-part sequence ‘Orphic Elegy’ that opens the first section of the book. In its retelling and revision of myths about Orpheus, this poem sheds a unique light on the historical breakdown of a holistic vision of the universe in modernity and the resulting alienation of humanity from nature and the divine. Parts I and II reimagine ancient Orphism. Part III focuses on the integration of art and science in the Renaissance. Part IV centres on the twentieth century and addresses the question famously formulated by the philosopher Theodor Adorno about whether it is possible to write poetry after Auschwitz. Part V revises myths about Orpheus’s magical ability to charm animals (and his relationship to the dead), in connection with the mass extinction of animals that is currently taking place. The poems in the book’s second section speculate in a mythopoetic and embodied way on the possibilities of establishing new forms of interconnection between art and the environment, mind and nature. The third section addresses the human relationship to animals, the ecological crisis, and the violence of colonisation, and wrestles with questions about how to bring up a child in the face of the challenging future that she will inherit. This collection takes the synthesis of poetry and philosophy to a new level of sophistication, insight and empathy previously unseen in Australian poetry.' (Publication summary)

'Carapace takes for its title an extension of the idea of shelter, protection and home and attempts to crack the outer shell of language to reveal the vulnerability of language forms, relationships, and safety. It archives the journey of a young girl towards developing, losing, and leaving relationships within share-houses. This book is a follow on from Rooftops in Karachi, where the young girl has left her family home in Australia to begin at the age of 15 to navigate the world of relationships within the boundaries of temporary share-housing. Further responding to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is the conviction that there are traceable transcendent possibilities of personal poetic phenomenology within the realm of the house. This work is distinctly a meditation on experiences of share-housing and seeks through the dimensions of the house, an archive of her encounters with sex, mental health, and identity, as experienced distinctly by a young POC woman in Brisbane from the mid 90s. The recollections are a new dialectic of inhabiting temporary space and relationships best expressed through a creature who is developing an outer shell, which is the only home she really embodies. The archive is intensely invested in corporeal experience, and is, sometimes explicit and forthright in its explorations. It makes a vital and original contribution to feminist writing, particularly POC Queer writing and to the Australian literary landscape since it invests and insists on narrative that gestures towards the beautiful and transcendental experiences.' (Publication summary)

'A path headed off underneath a row of low-lying bushes, below the tangle of old trees, small splashes of yellow paint indicating a direction of sorts, and silvery rays of light revealed a creek moving under the branches. And, for you, behind it all there was this conviction that something would always lead somewhere – as if feeling the sun for one moment on your body wasn’t enough ...

'Ideas of Travel builds in significant ways on Peter Boyle's previous two books, his award-winning Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings. This collection again taps into a deep dreamlike symbolism and directs this to great existential effect. Even staying still we are travelling—across the seasons, across the day, across a life. Written over fourteen months of the pandemic, Ideas of Travel subverts the boundaries between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, ourselves and others. In this sequence of 140 new poems acclaimed poet Peter Boyle examines our sense of what it is to be alive.' (Publication summary)