AustLit

'The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire’s maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice.

'The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law—that necessity is not a defence for murder—and is still taught at universities the world over.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Barry Hill's tenth book of poetry selects from his Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, 2013, and described by John Kinsella as a 'masterpiece'; Grass Hut Work (2016), his excursion into Hiroshima and Japanese poetry, which Sam Hamill said was 'beautiful and quietly powerful'; Lines for Birds (2011) his collaboration with the painter John Wolseley, was acclaimed by Nathaniel Tarn as 'a miraculous gift of a book'; The Inland Sea (2001), which David Malouf described as 'a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism'; Ghosting William Buckley (1993), deemed by Barrett Reid a 'major work' of 'stories, thought and music' from the encounter of a 'wild white man' and the indigenous people of the Australian frontier. This Selected also includes recent poetry--lyrical, political and in memoriam.' (Publication summary)

'"beautiful and sharp, critical and concise observations… gestures towards a neglected conversation between poetry and cultural studies in Australia."   —Tim Wright, Cordite

"… one of the most distinctive voices in Australian poetry"  —John Forbes, The Age

"from the erudite to the everyday, … the inconsequential, the tentative, are presented as more interesting than static profundities the author parodies in canonical poets … Yet his work is also a meditation on poetry"   —Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review' (Publication summary)

'"Sceptical as I am about anti-poetry, of which there is a lot around and which can assume many different forms, the fully formed poems are not the only writing I can value in a book like this. There is too much wit, absurdity, and sheer verbal craft to be ignored." --Peter Riley

'"We've all seen how, after a night of drones, an experimental poet comes out to read, wielding the vernacular, and the room lights up. There's laughter, joy, play, confusion, a rmation, all the things that make poetry what it is. This is why poets in the generation including Duggan, Pam Brown and Ken Bolton are so accessible to readers and listeners, because of their interest in the page-as-field (perhaps an 'Olsonesque' sense), and the everyday vernacular. The only reason Conventional Verse Culture still claims to own the (ever-elusive) 'average reader' is because of the structures and frameworks in place that tell people they do. This is not because people on the street speak like CVC." --A J Carruthers' (Publication summary)

'“Back forty years ago I wrote of The Gist of Origin: ‘In such a bare age as ours, the truth, though terrible, is clean. The worlds of Chaucer, Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones—even if the men in them shifted between realizations, incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them—and it is not nothing—is an economy of means. 
     'Ultimately the variety—of place, of instance, of event, of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them, deceptive—because it is all the one thing. And the one thing is terrible, because it is unclear whether it is not ourselves.’
    ' I think this era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture, which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit—adapted for the computerex machinery, but on the way to being mechanically replicated by it.
    ' Incidentally, the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply “the taste of words, the pleasure of utterance as a physical act”, in the words of Cid Corman.
—Clive Faust'  (Publication summary)

'"In the ancient tradition of poet-as-traveler-and-seer, Barry Hill's Grass Hut Work is, like Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, both a travelogue of Japan and a journey inward, into what we'll call the Soul-for lack of a better word. He sees with fresh eyes the merger of history and presence, and presents us vital insight at every turn. "In the grass hut," he says, "I strive to be nobody," and thereby becomes an everyman, an exemplar, a master and unsui, a beginner. Beautiful and quietly powerful, this is work to return to again and again." -Sam Hamill' (Publication summary)

'Comprising work from the early 1970s onwards, Reassembling Still is by far the largest and most comprehensive collection of David Miller’s poetry, and includes all of his poetry that he wishes to keep, with the exceptions of the ongoing Spiritual Letters project and his visual poems. ' (Publication summary)

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish losses from gains. The world we live in constantly changes and so how to make sense of it all? What is the relationship between mind and body when the mind’s world is built from the body’s sensations? What will we be when we return from war, from love? Who will we be in the post-human machine world? How will genetic manipulation change us and our representation of ourselves? The Told World contemplates some themes of ‘The Pastoral’ in a contemporary world and explores the stories that can be told from that chiaroscuro.

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'"This is poetry that goes direct to that other place and inhabits it. in possession of loss has a clear sparseness, almost a minimalism, that is also highly complex. Read as a single book-length poem, it thinks our world without telling openly. As in Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, everything hangs together and speaks the whole though one can’t exactly say how. Like Celan and Rilke before her, Cronin is a risk-taker: she can say 'love', 'loss', 'death', 'the heart', without tying the words to recognizable stories or hiding behind the game of avoiding meaning. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions. Compared to so much that is written in the English-speaking world, Cronin’s poetry IS so different and so itself." —Peter Boyle

'"As a subconscious cousin to Paz’s notion that ‘we are an accident that thinks’; in possession of loss seems on the verge of asking if the reason why we’re here, is not necessarily a good enough reason to be here? But unburdened of the (unsaid) question, the language resuscitates – propelling itself with an off-kilter energy on a doorknocking process that unsettles accepted norms. M.T.C. Cronin creates poetry at the speed of thought. She continues her downward spiral in an upward direction, agitating the core, somehow binding its fibres into a rope we can all climb to access the compelling view that is her own way of thinking. Is language dropping markers for her to follow, or is it the other way round? Her method is unhindered and elemental. This book is structured in left and right hand planes; a counterpoise between titled poems on one side, and bracketed (though untitled) philosophical ampoules on the other. It can be read as a call and response rowing back and forth between riverbanks of alternate silence. In this way her poetry becomes a transmission, filling the page with air as if it were a lung. Cronin’s work allows us to ‘breathe between what approaches existence and what exists no more’. She tells us ‘all words are coffins reopened’. So as ever, death is present, but even a finality such as this risks impotence without the constant blink of new life. Nothing can remain closed. Nothing leaves." —Nathan Shepherdson' (Publication summary)

'"The small poems… slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and looking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines." —Fiona Wright

'"Sceptical as I am about anti-poetry, of which there is a lot around and which can assume many different forms, the fully formed poems are not the only writing I can value in a book like this. There is too much wit, absurdity, and sheer verbal craft to be ignored." —Peter Riley

'"How ferociously Duggan attends both to the there of the world ('burnt patches amid pine') and the here of writing ('I ran out of town, meaning / there was no town left') …a kind of anthropological omnivorousness, all senses extended and out moves the piece along, using (including) everything, signs petering out or not."
 —John Latta

'"The upside-down peppershaker reflected on a metal table top; the note that 'the small gnats/ have ceased to wail'… and underneath a muffled drum-beat of persistent protest at the corrupt carelessness ruling so much of our planet. We called computer memory sticks thumb drives in my office. These poems have a similar function."
—Martha King' (Publication summary)

'Anything the Landlord Touches was Emma Lew's second collection to be published in Australia, where it was published by Giramondo of Newcastle, NSW, in 2002. The book won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry (the Victorian State Premier's award for poetry), and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award (the Queensland Premier's Prize for Poetry), two of the main literary prizes in the country, and was also short-listed for The Age award and the NSW and South Australian Premier’s Literary Prizes. Her first collection, The Wild Reply (Black Pepper Press, 1997) won The Age award. Emma Lew's poetry is marked by the pungency of her language and the dramatic intensity of her poems, often couched in the form of estranged monologues. Her lines can sometimes seem disconnected, but the pile-up of effects works like a montage, and the skewed observations circle their subject, searching for the core reality at the heart of the poem. This book is published in the UK and the USA by arrangement with Giramondo Publishing.' (Publication summary)

'John Mateer’s previous poetry book Southern Barbarians traced the influence of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean – it was shortlisted for the PM’s Award for Poetry and the NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Literary Awards. Unbelievers, or The Moor takes this exploration one step further, to recover its Arabic and Islamic origins in Al-Andalus, the Moorish state which occupied much of present-day Spain and Portugal from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. A seat of learning and culture, which combined Muslim, Christian and Jewish influences, it provides a model for Mateer’s own mixed background as a South African Australian, and for his nomadic identity as a poet. The collection is much concerned with influential but invisible histories; with the poem as a moment of connection between languages and cultures, so that it seems already to exist in translation; with doubles and hauntings, friends in far places, and above all, what Mateer calls ‘the irony of Elsewhere’.' (Publisher's blurb)

'"Pam Brown's work is fearless, acutely observant, witty and wry. She delights in the curiosities of the everyday, in notational sprezzatura, in the penetrating encapsulation of layers of time, chance and meaning with her twists of lexicon, diction and line break. This is a work of quotidian consternation, breaking through from irony to sheer fondness and painful shadows. She sees askew—and Home by Dark has its own poignant look at decades, bodies, and changes. Pam Brown is a wonderful writer, one of the scintillating wizards of Oz poetry." —Rachel Blau DuPlessis' (Publication summary)

'Naked Clay is an intimate response to the paintings of Lucian Freud—"the great amplifier of twentieth century figurative art," as the critic Sebastian Smee has written. With an astonishing touch for individual paintings, and for the connections between seeing and touching, Hill begins his own process of amplification with poems arising out of the "Flemish" portraits and life-studies of Freud's early work, those exacting acts of surveillance that made such an impression on London half a century ago. The poems then move, in keeping with Freud's shift of style, into the matters of flesh, nakedness and performance with which the painter is still confronting viewers.

'Of Freud's "late style", the painter Frank Auerbach wrote that it has "no safety net of manner." This might be said of Hill's engagement with Freud's incomparably candid treatment of his ailing mother, his naked daughters, his male and female friends, each of them tenderly and shockingly rendered in all their "creatureliness". The poems are as urgent as the paintings, and taken together they constitute an essay on the ambiguous gifts from a painter of such mortal, material presences.

'Barry Hill has created a unique space for the senses and the intellect to be prompted, explored and disturbed.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Views of the Hudson, written during a visit to New York in 2008, explores ideas of belonging and displacement. In a flood of images from this over-crowded information-rich city it weaves a narrative that suggests both the intoxication and dangers of believing in Promised Lands. Views of the Hudson shows the life of a city that is complicated and enriched for being at once both sacred and profane.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Subtitled The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli — a neglected 20th Century poet—this collection represents the merging of two contemporary Antipodean poets into the consciousness of a mysterious third imaginatively inhabited by many. Within the broadly surrealist tradition of experimentation and co-operative writing the collaborative Thean of mixed age, gender and genealogy channels polyphonous voices into an inclusive and complex vision. In this Opus #1, s/he participates in a rich diversity of dialogues — between a Japanese woman and her ghost-lover; between flawed dreams and their fracture into waking; between the individual speaker and the poet(s) he or she becomes only when heard or read. How Does a Man Who is Dead Reinvent His Body? is a remarkable departure for two of the finest poets from Australia's current middle generation.' (Publication summary)