AustLit

'Love—ancient and modern, ecstatic and mundane, sacred and profane—finds its Australian voice between the covers of this book.

'This important collection of new poems displays the richness and variety of contemporary Australian poetry. Here is larrikin love, ironic love and the understated love we inhabit.

'Australian Love Poems 2013 is a who’s who of Australian poets. It containing 200 poems from 173 Australian poets including well known poets Les Murray, Judith Beveridge, Cate Kennedy, Robert Gray, Paul Kelly and exciting new poetic talent.

'This is how we do love, how we fall in and out of it, yearn and turn and hurt in it, and how love leads us beyond ourselves. And this is how we write love: in sonnets, of course, pantoums, villanelles, haiku, ghazals, prose poems, free verse and aubades.

'The richness of love found in Australian Love Poems 2013 claims Australia as a poetic nation and a nation of love.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Martin Harrison (1949-2014) prepared and delivered this final manuscript at the end of a prolific creative life. With the vulnerability of a lover, the poet peels back one cover of truth after another; reckless for the evidence of the senses, he sifts light, sound, and smell. Poems like the skin of a world: breathing, walking, touching. Martin Harrison's culminating poetic achievement is a crossing over - stylistically, thematically, emotionally. Mapping the tragic chiasmus of love and death, it finally asserts the transcendent power of poetry to bear witness, to join us in a greater communion. Cosmopolitan and local, these triumphs of a 'late style' remind us what poetry is when its mastery allows the irony of existence to walk naked and to exult. ' (Publication summary)