AustLit

'The sixth edition of Sometimes Gladness includes three indexes to enable readers to find suitable texts. In addition to an alphabetical index, poems are also grouped according to form, and categorised by themes such as war, family, images or dreams.'

'Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle acknowledges one of Australia's best known poets and one of his best known poems. His life cycles have been poverty, perseverance and personal happiness; the rhythms of his being are the rhythms of his poetry - persistently fearless in speaking out on social and political issues; consistently sensitive and lyrical about painful concerns; insistently witty and satirical on just about anything. His range of poetry resists wrong and reveals a great love of his fellow man and a deep understanding of life. This biography is the first time that Dawe's life has been interpreted in full through his poetry, and the poems take on new significance when read in this context. The subject is telling some of the story in his own words - in poems.

Sometimes Gladness is Dawe's signature title and a best-seller of about 130,000 copies. Now in it's sixth edition, the book expresses a life long attempt to understand the balance between gladness and grief, the common factors of human experience. Verse cartooning and satirical humour, the constants of more than fifty years of writing, are much admired and enjoyed by readers and listeners of all ages. Dawe, one of Australia's first and most successful performance poets, provides imaginative scope to fill the spaces between humour and the pathos.

The reader of Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle shares a large experience, which effectively starts with 'Strictly En Passant', the first poem in the first book, No Fixed Address. Dawe looks forward to the multiplicity of 'feel and fragrance, sound and sheen' that his life will hold and he anticipates that, while he may not fully understand yet the meaning of a satisfactory existence, 'Time may build on this...' the existence culminates in 'Autobiography', in which Dawe measures what has been built. He says that he 'wouldn't have missed for anything' the experience of his life.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Paul Kelly’s songs are steeped in poetry. And now he has gathered from around the world the poems he loves – poems that have inspired and challenged him over the years, a number of which he has set to music. This wide-ranging and deeply moving anthology combines the ancient and the modern, the hallowed and the profane, the famous and the little known, to speak to two of literature’s great themes that have proven so powerful in his music: love and death – plus everything in between.

'Here are poems by Yehuda Amichai, W.H. Auden, Tusiata Avia, Hera Lindsay Bird, William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Constantine Cavafy, Alison Croggon, Mahmoud Darwish, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Fenton, Thomas Hardy, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Seamus Heaney, Philip Hodgins, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Ono No Komachi, Maxine Kumin, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Norman MacCaig, Paula Meehan, Czeslaw Milosz, Les Murray, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Ovid, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Porter, Rumi, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Izumi Shikibu, Warsan Shire, Kenneth Slessor, Wislawa Szymborska, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Ko Un, Walt Whitman, Judith Wright, W.B. Yeats and many more.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.