AustLit

'In Stephen Edgar’s new poetry collection Ghosts of Paradise three clusters of 14 poems, each a precisely sculpted jewel, are threaded together in precise sequence to create a dazzling array of people, places and moments in time. The title poem is ‘based on the fancy that in the distant future humanity may have evolved to the point where it is no longer entirely organic, or indeed corporeal’. First ghost among equals in Edgar’s paradise is WB Yeats, ‘waving his arms and shouting at the trees’. Then Adamson, Barthes, Browne, Dickinson, Disraeli and other wraiths from the pantheon. Sonnets and other traditional forms entwine with a rich panoply of characteristically original metrical conceits so cunningly employed that it is only after re-reading and reflection that the subtle structure declares itself.

'Pitt Street Poetry is proud to welcome Stephen Edgar to its roster of Australian poets with this new collection. Over the four decades since Queueing for the Mudd Club was published by Twelvetrees in Hobart in 1985, his reputation for delicately crafted, deftly observed and deeply thoughtful verse has grown to establish a strong Australian and international following, culminating in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2021 for his survey collection The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (Blackpepper 2020), of which British author John Banville wrote, ‘What wonderful poems these are. Stephen Edgar should be recognized as one of the very best poets of our days.’'  (Publication summary)

'Central to Andrew Taylor’s Shore Lines is a sequence of poems written during the bushfire season of 2019 and the subsequent Covid pandemic. During a period of national trauma, the poems find consolation in the powerful regenerative energy of the natural world. The setting of the beach suburb of Coogee reflects an ongoing interest in Australia’s coastline, which is also a central image in a number of poems that explore the poet’s childhood and family life. Several poems are obituaries for those dear to him, and others explore elements of personal and family history, including the consequences of his ancestors’ role as pioneers in the early settlement of Victoria. Many poems reflect an interest in natural phenomena such as landscape, the weather and, particularly, birds and, in the ocean, the whales that traverse the NSW and Victorian coast.' (Publication summary)

'A shadow box on a sitting room wall; a hat box hiding a wedding dress and a kit bag; a hallstand decorated with hand-carved kurrajong leaves… In such leftovers from other lives, these poems began.

'The Shadow Box is a book-length sequence of poems inspired by the experiences of my maternal grandparents, George and Jean Campbell, during and shortly after World War I. From their marriage a month before George left for war, through four years of separation—broken briefly by a six month visit by Jean to him in Egypt—the poems attempt to recreate their daily lives on different sides of the world. They draw on George’s diary and Jean’s letters to him, as well as my own imagination, to celebrate a family history which is both a cameo of another time, and strangely resonant with challenges in our world today.' (Publication summary)

'Ron Pretty’s new and selected collection, 101 Poems is published by Pitt Street Poetry. Pretty has been writing and publishing for over 50 years, and this new book contains a selection of the best poems from his eight earlier collections and five chapbooks, plus a selection of new poems. The concerns that motivated his earlier work are displayed here as the poems explore family, ethical and political issues, other cultures and our own, and music.
'A summing up of a life’s work; this will be his last published collection.' (Publication summary)

'Slack tide is the turning point when a body of tidal water can seem uncertain as to whether it is coming in or going out. While surface water may be deceptively calm at this time, below the surface huge divergent forces are at work. In the title of Sarah Day’s ninth collection the term is an expression of twenty-first century unease. World events and global forces are an oblique presence in much of this collection in whose poems private and public disturb one another’s space and boundaries. While the themes often hold considerable gravitas, there is playfulness and whimsy too, in tone, voice, and angle of approach. These poems seek what Robert Pinsky called ‘a collaboration between the external world and the self, between language and intention’.' (Publication summary)

'Twenty-four individual collections published over the last fifty years. Events, reviews, mentorships, jazz musings and a warm, benevolent influence which reaches out from Canberra to every corner of the national poetry landscape.

'This selection of 101 Poems surveys some of his best poetry, from A Sudden Sentence in the Air (2011) to In medias res (PSP 2019), and offers as an encore nineteen new, previously uncollected poems, including ‘Jericho’ which won the ACU Poetry Prize in 2020.

'Join us in celebrating Geoff Page as he enters his ninth decade, his witty, affable, insightful and singular voice honed to its finest edge.'   (Publication summary)