AustLit

With a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’).' (Introduction)

'Illness memoir is based on a tension between the general and the particular. The writer presents (to use a medical term) as both representing all sufferers of a particular malady – in this case, myeloma – and a unique individual experiencing a specific, unrepeatable event. Peter Goldsworthy, who is both a GP and a prize-winning writer, is better equipped than most to engage with this tension.' (Introduction) 

'To fall is to be human. We fall in love, fall asleep, and fall from grace. And in this epoch that we have called the Anthropocene, we are witnessing nothing less than the fall of nature.

'This extraordinary collection, the fifth by the prize-winning poet David McCooey, covers the full tragicomic spectrum of falling: from pratfalls to tragic demises, from accident-prone parents to ruinous celebrities.

'Within its unifying thematic focus, The Book of Falling is tonally and formally diverse, attending with great artistry to the calamities and absurdities of history and the contemporary world. The collection comprises of satires and elegies, inventive poetic autofictions and biofictions, and innovative photopoems, employing found photos and photographs by the author. This is a collection that welcomes its readers, even as it plunges them into new ways of understanding the beautiful, fallen worlds that we inhabit.' (Publication summary)

'Sarah Holland-Batt’s Fishing for Lightning is a book about Australian poetry. As such, it is a rare, and welcome, bird in the literary ecology of our country. It is welcome because poetry, like any other art form, requires a supportive culture that educates and promulgates. Not that Holland-Batt, herself one of our leading poets, is ‘merely’ didactic, or a shill for the muses. Holland-Batt, who is also an academic, writes with great authority and insight, and she is a fine stylist, penning essays that are packed with humour and playfulness. These essays cater for all kinds of audiences, from newcomers to poetry experts, which is no small feat.'  (Introduction)

'Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a poetics is visible in the central role that material dirt (as both pollution and terrain) plays in Kinsella’s work, as well as the more general concept of impurity, as seen in Kinsella’s poetic trafficking in ideas concerning transgression, liminality, hybridity, and danger. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” In the poem “Dirt” (from Kinsella’s 2014 collection Sack), dirt remains understandable as matter out of place, but it also becomes radically mobile, its material and symbolic weight subject to unexpected transformations. The eponymous dirt in Kinsella’s poem is being carted from one place to another by the poet’s near neighbour for “purposes unknown.” This “shitload of dirt,” dumped onto the dirt of the valley’s floor, makes its way into the disturbingly porous bodies – both human and non-human – around it. It is “something you sense in arteries” and “the haze / that lights and encompasses us all.” This poem can be taken as a metonym for Kinsella’s entire literary oeuvre. Employing his “poetics of dirt,” Kinsella attends to the dispossessed dirt of a post/colonial nation; the dirt of contemporary farming practices; the dirt of official and vernacular languages; and the dirt of personal secrets. This essay argues that Kinsella’s “poetics of dirt” cannot be disambiguated from his activist poetics, and the profoundly auto/biographical nature of his writing. Attending to postcolonial theory and life-writing studies, this essay analyses how Kinsella thematises dirt as central to both life writing (in prose and poetry) and a life of writing. In doing so, it considers dirt as something not simply “out of place,” but – in a postcolonial, post-sacred, and late-capitalist world – endlessly mobile, unstable, and transformative, moving between material and discursive realities in newly complex ways. By attending to dirt (both as matter and as pollutant) within the context of his various auto/biographical projects, Kinsella conspicuously draws attention to the relationship between the human and the material, profoundly questioning – in a way akin to a “new materialist” perspective – the consequences of a human-centred ontology. At its most radical, the “poetics of dirt” found in Kinsella’s life writing posits a world in which human subjectivity is not the only agental force in the material world.' (Publication abstract)

 (Publication abstract)

'The death of the Australian poet Les Murray at the age of 80 is a profound loss for his family and friends. It is also a great loss for literature. Whether one writes “world literature” or “Australian literature” here signifies not only Murray’s standing, but also a profound tension in his status as a poet. Murray has long been seen, not only as Australia’s pre-eminent living poet, but also as its national poet.'  (Introduction) 

'In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal-engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less-then what are the limits of life writing? Where does it begin and end? Do we live in a culture of life writing that has no limits? Life writing-as both a practice and a scholarly discipline-is itself markedly concerned with limits: the limits of literature, of genres, of history, of social protocols, of personal experience and forms of identity, and of memory.

'By attending to limits, border cases, hybridity, generic complexities, formal ambiguities, and extra-literary expressions of life writing, The Limits of Life Writing offers new insights into the nature of auto/biographical writing in contemporary culture. The contributions to this book deal with subjects and forms of life writing that test the limits of identity and the tradition of life writing. The liminal case studies explored include magical-realist fiction, graphic memoir, confessional poetry, and personal blogs. They also explore the ethical limits of representation found in Holocaust life writing, the importance of ficto-critical memoir as a form of resistance for trans writers, and the use of `postmemoir' to navigate the traumas of diasporic experience. In addition, The Limits of Life Writing goes beyond the conventional limits of life writing scholarship to consider how writers themselves experience limits in the creation of life writing, offering a work of life writing that is itself concerned with charting the limits of auto/biographical expression. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.'    (Publication summary)