AustLit

'Not many writers have the gift of turning visual works into poetry that is not static. Still fewer have the gift of turning fine poetry into a good read. Amelia Walker has both gifts. This is not surprising: an emerging writer, Walker is highly regarded as a poet and performer of her own work, and has toured in Australia, India and North America. Her scholarly work and (auto)fictions have also won a variety of prizes. Her new book, Dreamday, is an unpaginated verse novella. You will not need page numbers. Before you know it, you will have found yourself unable to stop. Before you know it, you will have fallen under the spell of the speaking persona.' (Introduction)

'A good ecopoem, Christopher Arigo explains, is ‘a house … founded on the tension between the cutting edge of innovation and ecological thinking’ (Arigo 2007: 3). Such poems abound in Kristin Lang’s The Weight of Light – a sensually metaphysical collection that subtly yet profoundly ekes out interrelations between humans and animals, language and nature, technology and the immaterial. In line with Gander and Kinsella’s suggestion that ecological poetry ‘might be developed rhizomatically, it might be described as a nest, a collectivity’ (Gander & Kinsella 2012: 13), Lang emphasises the thrumming yet too often overlooked interrelatedness of things via her deft weaving of motifs including moons and mountains, muscle and shadow, silence and breath. This is a collection that demands multiple readings – and rewards them – opening and offering new insights, new articulations with each fresh encounter, each return.'  (Introduction)

'Koel is Jen Crawford’s third poetry collection and it clearly demonstrates the development of a challenging but highly rewarding poetic voice. This is a poet both confident and experimental, who is pushing at the boundaries of place and movement, what is remembered and an immersive present tense, the human subject and the ‘environment’, what we know and what we don’t. In the preface, Crawford suggests: ‘I was looking for gaps to step through, for ways both forward and back’. Koel catapaults the reader through these gaps of uncertainty and possibility.'  (Introduction)

'‘Poetry is an exile’s art,’ remarked American poet Charles Wright. ‘Anyone who writes it seriously writes from an exile’s point of view’ (Wright 2002: 27).

'What if a poet manages to capture not only the exile’s point of view but also the insider’s? What happens if those viewpoints converge?  In Glass, her latest collection of Australian-born, Mexico-based poet, Rose Hunter accounts for both perspectives, and limns their somewhat uneasy merger. The more miles the ‘i’ of the poems clocks up on the road and the more places she records, the less the destinations seem to matter, and the more interiorised the journey actually becomes.' (Introduction)

'Since pre-colonial days in northern Australia, cultural practices, material objects and living things have been exchanged and transformed across the sea. Biologists and archaeologists believe that Australia’s dingo was introduced by Asian seafarers around 4,000 years ago. It adapted and spread across the continent and was incorporated within Aboriginal cosmologies. From at least 1700, Makassar fishermen harvested trepang (or sea-cucumber) on an annual basis in Australia, with China also participating in this trade. Anthropologists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Alfred Cort Haddon and Donald Thomson, noted the interweaving of cultural traditions among Indigenous populations spread across the Arafura Sea.' (Introduction)