AustLit

'She might have said she couldn’t go. Might never have clambered into that car. What shoes was she wearing. There must have been a radio. Cigarettes. Bacardi. Joints. The smell of hair gel. Night wide open. Somebody driving them into it. Her neck her hands holding on. Always they conked out on Willunga Hill. Tonight the same. Cars tooting braying offering threatening. She stood in the shadow swish of pine trees making herself raise her head and stare at unnameable constellations caught between premonition and memory. The pines were the halfway mark between home and escape until someone said some people don’t like pines, they call them invaders, and everything once again had to be reassessed.' (Introduction) 

'As happens most years, there was a good haul of collections with energy, sustained craft and distinctive perspectives. Nothing explosive - no first performances of 'The Rite of Spring' - but poetry doesn't operate like that. It emerges, rather, through the bubbling accretion of the work of poets maturing at different times, pursuing different possibilities and inventing different styles to articulate them with. There were a small number of high-profile selections this year, such as Sarah Holland-Batt's excellent 'The Jaguar', a handful of Selecteds surveying the poetry of some who have been at the coalface for many decades - Alan Wearne, Jill Jones, Andrew Taylor - together with the regular offering of ambitious and thoughtful collections such as the books reviewed here, which inevitably only represent a selection of those that deserve attention.' 

(Publication abstract)

'After Black Inc.’s long-running Best Australian Poems series was discontinued in 2018, a ‘gap’ was left in the ‘market’. The publisher Australian Poetry stepped in, publishing the first Best of Australian Poems in early 2021, edited by Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch. The second volume followed in early 2022, edited by Jeanine Leane and Judith Beveridge.' (Introduction)