AustLit

'In Travelling Among the Stars, one of Australia’s best-known poets, Peter Skrzynecki, ranges across the course of his life, gathering recurrent images and memories, places and moments into a whole. The title of the collection is from ‘Epitaph’ the last poem, written in response to a moment of satori on the tarmac at Sydney airport. Skrzynecki’s poetry emerges from the natural world, from a lifetime moving back and forward across New England, the landscape inhabiting him as much as he inhabits it. These poems give the shape of a life looked back on, traces the cycle of seasons, the cycle of the years, the simple lived truths of growing up and growing old. The realization of the roles of parents in one’s life and the awareness of ageing in one’s own body run through the collection, and alongside them an acceptance for the impermanence of things. Family, nature, spirituality, the elements and seasons, and dreams co-mingle, pass by and return – culminating in acceptance and submission to a force beyond the tangible and visible, the light in the darkness before the first bird sings. From one of Australia’s best-known poets, Travelling Among the Stars offers a summation of a life lived devoted to poetry and bears witness to the impermanence at the heart of wonder and the simple daily awe of being human.' (Publication summary)

'A stray dog finds a family who takes it in and it becomes the family pet. What follows is an exciting story of how this pet turns their lives around and what lengths they have to go to in order to keep it. Will the family succeed? The Dog with the Golden Paws is also about the love that exists between humans and dogs and the enrichment that a pet brings into people’s lives.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A Fiercer Light honours the life and work of one of Australia’s greatest poets, Judith Wright, who was also an Aboriginal land rights activist and environmentalist. This tribute collection of essays provides a new understanding of her life’s work without becoming an academic treatise.'  (Publication summary)

'The Rainbow-birds follows a new, combined flight path for the award winning poet Peter Skrzynecki and his artist son.

'Peter Skrzynecki is a poet and fiction writer of Polish-Ukrainian descent. This is the autobiography / memoir of a young teacher appointed to a one-teacher school at Jeogla on the New England Tablelands in the 1960s: an appointment that leads to the discovery of people, places and poetry. Jeogla, like Walden for Henry David Thoreau, becomes a sanctuary, a retreat for the observation of the natural world, the high country with its mountains, rivers, waterfalls and wildlife; it stirs the awakenings of self-reliance. Included in the narrative is the story of a family’s tragedy and a broken promise, the consequences of which reverberate for many years until they are resolved by the healing process of Time. Or are they?' (Publication summary)