'Afloat in Light by David Adès is, as its title suggests, circadian: like a field of sunflowers, the lines of poetry face towards the light but are anchored firmly in the soil. At times, this is the parched dirt of the desert as in “Between Us” (45-48) which celebrates the sacred beauty of the dry interior of Australia; at others, it is the mud remembered from childhood as both wondrous artistic medium and wonderful plaything. Such imagery is foreshadowed in the opening line of the collection: “There was childhood: wispy residence of dreams, / of imagination, of possibility” (“We Are Fallen” 11).'  (Introduction)

'Jonathan Hadwen’s sequence of vignettes, All That Wasted Heat, is elegant and edgy, experimental and experiential, and spellbindingly beautiful. It is based in an unnamed inner-city Australian suburb replete with share houses, hostels, and homeless shelters that might be New Farm in Brisbane, or Newtown in Sydney, or Newport in Melbourne but is all of these places and nowhere at the same time. The era in which the sequence is set is a kind of timeless modernity: it could be the 1990s, or yesterday, or tomorrow.'  (Introduction)

'Melinda Smith’s goodbye, cruel is an accomplished collection of poems from an established voice in Australian poetry. This is the fifth collection from the former poetry editor of the Canberra Times. As the title suggests, the prevailing theme of this work is suicide: subject matter that might be mishandled by a maudlin or morbid writer of lesser skill. From Smith’s lines emerges a human pathos, tempered by a humane ethos, as the many voices she creates, mimics, translates, adapts-via-erasure, and adopts-via-cento take on a life (and death) of their own.'  (Introduction)

'The late British poet Geoffrey Hill once remarked that “difficult poetry is the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings.” Hill’s poetry was often labelled “difficult” due to his penchant for unusual words and obscure historical events. By contrast, Jane Williams’s Parts of the Main is “difficult” even as she avoids archaic language to achieve a primal simplicity of statement. Her plain-speaking, highly-palatable style is the very thing that renders her poetry “difficult” as it is coupled with often disconcerting content. '  (Introduction)

'Shastra Deo’s almost preternaturally-accomplished début collection, The Agonist, winner of the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, displays the detailed delight of a masochistic forensic scientist poring over a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to find exactly which muscle, tendon, or ligament is causing their exquisite ache. Indeed, each of the three sequences that make up the cohesive collection is preceded by an illustration from this tome: vivisections of the heart and lungs, the hand, and the throat and mouth. Deo devotes her work to blood, bone, organ, and flesh, at times homing in on the reader’s carotid artery with vampiric precision; at others staking the reader’s heart as she takes on the converse role of Van Helsing. Although Deo’s work is not confessional, peopled as it is with a number of spectral speakers, the title may be read as eponymous: the agonist is the poet herself. “Agonist” means, variously, a muscle which contracts in order to move a part of the body directly, the protagonist of a literary work, and a person devoted to the study of agony.'  (Introduction)

'When the cancer diagnosis comes, it is September and we are at a family wedding 1000 kilometres away. At first, there’s mention of radiation therapy but that talk soon dies away. Bob is 91. His bones are riddled with disease, which explains the recent trouble he’s had with walking.'  (Introduction)

'In La Paz, I live with an old couple who do not know my name. They are both losing their grip on the order of things, you can tell from the look of distant confusion that flits across their faces when they ask me, for the umpteenth time, ¿tu nombre? To get to my room at the top of their house I have to climb several flights of stairs, and the thin air leaves me gasping for breath. It’s unsettling to stand on the landing with your head spinning, vision blacking in and out, and then to hear a thin wavering voice float up from below: ¿tu nombre? No matter how many times I tell them my name, the question repeats itself, sending a cold electric jolt up my spine: has there been a mistake? Am I allowed to be here? But I have always known myself as an imposter, skirting the edges of an eventual exposure. For years the moment arrived in a recurring dream: I stood at a conference podium reading my thesis to an audience that appeared not to hear me. Even my supervisor’s face was blank. What are you doing here? Your name? Coming now from the bottom of the stairs, the question prods at the raw, flickering heart of my old fear. As if the reckoning I waited for has arrived to meet me in La Paz, Bolivia: the highest city in the world.'  (Introduction)

'When I spoke with Christoph von Dohnànyi about what he’d chosen to conduct in Sydney, there was no mention of symphonies and concertos. Rather, he spoke of men. As if arranging places at a dinner party, he told me he never ‘put Bruckner with Beethoven, he’s better with Mozart’ but that, this time, he’d decided to put him with Berg. Speaking as if he knew them, he explained that Berg and Bruckner shared a mentality, but took a different approach to life. Bruckner looked inward, his ideas centred in themselves, whereas Berg asked a lot of questions. Why did this have to happen? Why did this wonderful woman have to die so young? As Dohnànyi painted it, I imagined that if they met in heaven they would discuss romance long into the afterlife. For that was the reality: even though Dohnànyi spoke of them in present tense, he could not restore them to the present. All he had were their scores and the secrets bound up in them.'  (Introduction)