AustLit

'Pirate Rain builds on the highly acclaimed George Jefferies poems, exploring themes of power, violence, politics and love across Paris, Baghdad, New York and the waters of the Gulf.

The poems discuss the US Presidential campaign, the War on Terror, economic crises and celebrity meltdowns on the one hand, and intensely personal themes of anger, privacy, family, art and love on the other, bringing each into sharp and often biting relief against the other.

Pirate Rain is a vigorous, rich and witty collection, from one of the most individual voices of contemporary Australian poetry.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Goad Omen is Corey Wakeling's first full-length collection of poems, a vibrant and witty interplay of depths and resurfacings, portraying a world littered with grim foreshadowings and kitschy memorabilia alike.' (Publisher's blurb)

'John Mateer’s previous poetry book Southern Barbarians traced the influence of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean – it was shortlisted for the PM’s Award for Poetry and the NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Literary Awards. Unbelievers, or The Moor takes this exploration one step further, to recover its Arabic and Islamic origins in Al-Andalus, the Moorish state which occupied much of present-day Spain and Portugal from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. A seat of learning and culture, which combined Muslim, Christian and Jewish influences, it provides a model for Mateer’s own mixed background as a South African Australian, and for his nomadic identity as a poet. The collection is much concerned with influential but invisible histories; with the poem as a moment of connection between languages and cultures, so that it seems already to exist in translation; with doubles and hauntings, friends in far places, and above all, what Mateer calls ‘the irony of Elsewhere’.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Devadatta’s Poems complements the sequence ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, published in Beveridge’s earlier collection Wolf Notes, which followed the travels of Siddhatta Gotama before he became the Buddha, and portrayed the world from his disciplined and ascetic point of view. These new poems are written from the viewpoint of Devadatta, Siddhatta’s jealous and ambitious cousin, who attempted to murder him three times. They are marked by an extraordinary richness of language and detail, and a dedication to sensation, which is in contrast to Siddhatta’s purity, and caused at least in part by Devadatta’s desire for Yasodahra, his cousin’s wife.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Maria Takolander is a poet of uncompromising vision and imaginative power. She strips the world of easy sentiment, restoring experience to the realm of the body and the materiality of history. Her work is characterised by gothic beauty, but it can also be marked by deadpan wit. This collection is divided into three parts, focusing on the alienating event of childbirth; those places of the poet’s imaginative landscape haunted by the past (Finland, South America, and Australia); and the cruelties suffered and inflicted by the human animal. The End of the World, Takolander’s second full-length poetry collection, reveals the strangeness of our lives in verse that is often provocative and always striking.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Final Theory is a long poem told in episodes, combining two fragmentary story lines – the one following a couple as they travel through landscapes which are at different times pristine and ravaged by progress; the other portraying the sensations of a child tumbling through the ocean, encountering evidence of lost worlds. Researched and composed in countries that were once part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana – New Zealand, Australia and Antarctica – the poem places its figures within vast scales of time and space. The focus on two generations, the near-future and the far-off future, raises questions about the development of consciousness, and what place we as humans have in the unfinished process of chance and change.' (Publication summary)

The title of Joanne Burns’ new collection brush highlights the reader’s first experience of a poem, its initial electricity; and the way the poem offers a surface of words that proceeds to reveal their possibilities or intentions. The central sequence ‘road’ is an animated display of the fashions of being in contemporary life – these poems are cheeky, playful, mercurial, surreal. Then there is the sequence called ‘bluff’, which excoriates twenty-first century financial culture with bite, hilarity and a sense of the absurd. There is a section devoted to personal memoir, including a five-part poem featuring Bondi beach, and a suite of memory fragments depicting twentieth-century modes of travel. The final group of poems, ‘wooing the owl (or the great sleep forward)’, explores the night, sleep and dreams, with their strange tones and surprising perspectives. There are 80 poems in the collection, most of them short, stressing the compressed pleasure that only poetry can offer. [From the publisher's website]

'Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literature Award, the richest literary prize in Australia Shortlisted for the international Griffin Poetry Prize Drones and Phantoms is a powerful successor to Maiden's prize-winning collection Liquid Nitrogen, and again features her unique interweaving of the personal and the political, in the use of intimate and public poetic modes within each poem and within the collection as a whole. The poems are in fact conversations, not only between the poet and the reader, but between historical and political figures, such as Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, Tanya Pliberesek and Jane Austen, Mandela and Obama, Queen Victoria and Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who come to life in Maiden's poems to discuss their anxieties and ethical insecurities. There are also poems on the Cypriot financial crisis, Jimmy Hoffa, Judith Wright, Julia Gillard, the Copenhagen giraffe killing and Russian power in the Crimea. Maiden is unique both for the interrogative power of her poems, and the sense of vulnerability they express, in their subjects, and in the poet herself.' (Publication summary)

'Jam Sticky Vision is the successor to Luke Beesley's highly-regarded third book of poetry, New Works on Paper, published by Giramondo in 2013. The poems in this collection blend observation, memory and anecdote - with particular interest in American film, rock music, visual arts and poetry, and the way they inhabit the poet's everyday life in contemporary Melbourne. They create 'an uncanny universe', which hovers somewhere between the real world and that of the poet's imagination, characterised by surprising encounters and fleeting details rendered with the utmost clarity, full of intimate disclosures and yet somehow public in its openness, where everything is animated by liveliness - objects, sensations, colours, even words as they appear on the page. As one critic has noted, "Beesley's books make for very healthy reading. Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, the menu not overly processed - no greasy late-night noir." As another has written, "his windows open out to an 'other' view, wholly within our grasp but difficult to articulate".' (Publication summary)

'Many poems in this collection explore the intrusions of 'the wild' into daily life, through memories, in illness, and in places that you've lost or left behind. Dougan is interested in the ways in which the past re-enters the present, particularly through the secrets of family life, in all kinds of atavism, and in pockets of wildness in the suburbs and the city which are a source of liveliness and a dark sort of energy. Her poems feature old houses, ruins, revisited places; they focus on the bonds between the generations, between children and adults, humans and animals, and humans and the physical world. The title of the collection refers broadly to these ties, which impose a sense of guardianship on those who are bound by them. In contrast to the wildness they recognise, the poems themselves seek to tread lightly - they aspire to quietness and reticence, to cumulative rather than immediate effects, and to sustaining a relatively natural and unobtrusive voice.' (Publication summary)

'New poems by Australia's foremost political poet, written in response to the social crises that confront us now.

'Jennifer Maiden's new collection deals with xenophobia and the rejection of otherness, whether immigrant or domestic. It takes as its emblem the fox, representing our fear of the introduced and ill-reputed, but its title also refers to the petition of the great Whig statesman, Charles James Fox, for the rights of all people, including freedom of speech and habeas corpus. Fox himself is the subject of some of the poems, while others focus on the crisis in Greece, Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt reflecting on poverty and human rights in Iowa, and the development of Julie Bishop in relation to the vulnerability and sensibility engendered by politics and crisis. There is a dialogue between Obama and Gandhi on the methods needed to ensure political results, Kevin Rudd tries to explain Manus Island to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Keith Murdoch and his son Rupert discuss their attempts at idealism in the glass penthouse apartment of the latter.' (Publication summary)

'Hazel Smith’s new poetry collection engages in a direct way with contemporary political and social issues – civil war and the flight of populations, oppressive regimes and the disappearance of dissidents, the unpredictable effects of climate change – relating these issues to the personal experience of death and dementia, abuse and disability and childlessness. The poems project intense psychological states of indecisiveness, anxiety, disorientation and guilt, making use of surreal conjunctions and metaphor to dramatise the sense of unease. Smith is a new media artist and musician, and the poems employ a variety of techniques drawn from these fields, flourishes of linguistic coloratura, the evocation of virtual realities, cutting and pasting from the internet, remixing, sampling and quotation, to drive home their effects.' (Publication summary)

'Antigone Kefala is one of the elders of Australian poetry, highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of the small number of poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing in its effects. Fragments is her first collection of new poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of New and Selected Poems in 1998, and possibly her last. It follows her prose work Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008) of which one critic wrote, 'Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it'. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, though the territory is often darker now, as the poet patrols the liminal spaces between life and death, alert to the energies which lie in wait there. And such energies! "Up, in the blue depth / a bird cut with its wings / the light / such silk, that fell / and rose, heavily, / singing through the air.' (Publication summary)

'Debut collection by a young poet whose simple, funny and deceptively naïve poems engage with the virtual realities of the internet.

'The Honeymoon Stage is a collection of poems written for friends on the internet over a five-year period. These friends were spread across the globe, and most of them the poet had never met, and will never know. Poetry was the method by which the correspondents felt they could authenticate themselves to one another, despite their separation in space, and their friendships being mediated through screens. The poems engage with the flattened syntax of internet language, registering its awkwardness while bringing human qualities to the centre of the exchange. They inhabit a surreal world marked by shifting identities and video-clip encounters, blog-like intimacies and strange scraps of information, discovering in this reality new ways of thinking and feeling.' (Publication summary)

'A hoarding Chinese grandmother fills her home with objects, unable to distinguish between the value of things. Meanwhile, her Asian-Australian grandson travels to China for the first time, wary of the revelations that the trip might offer, as he tries to make sense of his own Chinese and Anglo-Australian background. In Guangzhou, Kaiping, Shanghai, and Beijing, amidst the incessant construction and consumption of twenty-first-century China, a shadowy heritage reveals and withholds itself, while the suburbs he knows from back home are threaded into the cities he visits, forming an intricately braided Chinese-Australian inheritance.' (Publication Summary)

'Middleton reintroduces the reader to the world, to the strange and familiar, in ways that stay on, dwelling in the imagination with a sense of something akin to obsessive reverence. Jo Langdon, Mascara Literary Review

'Kate Middleton’s third poetry collection continues her preoccupation with terrestrial and other landscapes, both real and imagined. The poems haunt, and are haunted by, the legacies of literature and history: whether inhabiting the scientific laboratory, the exploratory voyage, the layered history of landscape, or the voices of past authors, they are interested in the border-zones of understanding, in both the ‘the riddle of untrodden land’ and the buried history of lost empires. Formally, the poems move between traditional lyric and collage-style forms of quotation and erasure. Others take a speculative turn away from the book’s historical grounding, such as in the sequence of poems titled ‘Watching Science Fiction’ that are scattered throughout the book. Passage traces an imaginative path through orientation and disorientation, where a god in the form of a lion and rabbits with eyes ‘fantastically in bloom’ surprise and enchant at every turn. It observes the world under a watchful gaze, ‘Patient as an avalanche.’' (Publication summary)

'Once a working-class heartland, Newcastle is now acclaimed as one of the top 5 hipster cities in the world. In the sequence of sonnets which compose her homage to Newcastle, Glastonbury celebrates the city's oddities and contradictions, remixing the material effects of gentrification with the regional vernacular and punk drama of locally based social media – blogs, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Google Maps. An antipodean, regional queering of Ted Berrigan’s New York-based Sonnets, Glastonbury’s poems make music from what's around, embracing both DIY chutzpah and the swipes, likes, and filtered screens of internet culture. This is Newcastle in cosplay, part eggs benedict, part pebblecrete, where a coal boat named 'Fiction' is always approaching the shore.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Aqua Spinach rounds out a trilogy of books interested in the affinities between poetry and other media – visual arts, music, and particularly in this collection, cinema. The poems in Aqua Spinach blend observation, memory and anecdote, producing surrealistic imagery as they pivot and twist from image to image. They are infused with the atmosphere of surrealist cinema, mimicking the films’ focus on dreams, fragments and humour, while also speaking to the author's quotidian Melbourne milieu.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Gerald Murnane turns to poetry at the end of his literary career, writing frank, disarming poems that traverse the rich span of his life.  

'I esteem / above all poems or passages of prose / those that put a lump in my throat. — Gerald Murnane, ‘The Darkling Thrush’

'Gerald Murnane, now in his eightieth year, began his writing career as a poet. After many years as a writer of fiction, he only returned to poetry a few years ago when he moved to Goroke, in the Western Districts of Victoria, after the death of his wife. The forty-five poems collected here are in a strikingly different mode to his fiction — without framing or digressions, and with very few images, they speak openly to the reader of the author’s memories, beliefs and experiences. They are for this reason an important addition to his internationally recognised body of fiction, most recently Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction, published by Giramondo.

'The poems include tributes to his mother and father and to his family, and to places that have played a formative role in his life, like Gippsland, Bendigo, Warrnambool, the Western Districts, and of course Goroke. Especially moving are his poems dedicated to authors who have influenced him — Lesbia Harford and Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Henry Handel Richardson, Marcel Proust, and with particular force, the eighteenth-century poet John Clare, who gives the collection its title, revered ‘not only for his writings / but for his losing his reason when / he was forced from the district he had wanted as his for life.’'  (Publication summary)

'A unique, intimate portrait of writer’s working life,as experienced by one of Australia’s most highly regarded novelists and artists.

'A Novel Idea is a memoir in photoessay form that follows Fiona McGregor’s life as she writes her award-winning novel Indelible Ink. It is a tongue-in-cheek rumination on the monotony and loneliness of the novelist’s daily life, and the act of endurance the writer must perform.

'Through an extended sequence of photographs taken on a hand-me-down camera, accompanied by terse, evocative captions, the book spans several years of labour and procrastination, elation and despair. The details of the outside world intrude as McGregor works on the novel alone in her Bondi flat, with nothing but a desk, a pin-board, a laptop and a cat, and in studio spaces in Berlin and Estonia.

'McGregor’s voice is wry, vulnerable, at times caustic, capturing the colloquial qualities of her fiction and the durational nature of her performance art via the ephemeral and essential thoughts that take up an author’s days, weeks, and years.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The dark aura of Emma Lew’s poetry has made her a compelling and mysterious presence for successive generations of Australian poets. Lew is highly regarded for the dramatic intensity of her poetry, which combines sudden shifts of voice and perspective with a heightened awareness of the moment. Her mastery of the ominous setting and the resonant line, and her command of poetic form – particularly the interior monologue, the pantoum and the villanelle – draw on a deep correspondence between the figure of the defiant woman, volatile, dangerous, ironic, and the destructive forces of history. This selection brings together poems from her previous collections The Wild Reply, Anything the Landlord Touches and Luminous Alias, as well as twenty-four new poems not previously collected in book form.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Intimate Antipathies is a collection of essays on the writing life, offering Luke Carman’s unique comic perspectives on writers’ festivals, residencies and conferences, the particular challenges faced by writers who grow up in contested borderlands like the suburbs of Western Sydney, and the connections between writing and dreaming, writing and mental illness, writing and the complications of family life. From his famous jeremiad against arts administrators in ‘Getting Square in a Jerking Circle’, through the psychotic attack brought on by the collapse of his marriage, to his surreal account of meeting with Gerald Murnane at a golf club in the remote Victorian village of Goroke, the essays follow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy – always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountain in Sydney’s west, where his antipathies with the real world first began to shape his imagination.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'On Drugs explores philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of drug addiction, which begins while he is a student and then becomes a life-threatening obsession.

'Fleming describes the intricate mechanics of drug acquisition and use, their impact on the intellect and the emotions, and the chaos that emerges as his tightly controlled life spins out of control. His account is informed by searching reflections on his childhood, with its acute obsessive compulsive disorder and auditory hallucinations, through to his teenage fixations on karate, music and bodybuilding magazines. Combining a meticulous, almost ethnographic observation of his own life with a keen sense of the absurd, On Drugs opens out into philosophical meditations on time, religion, popular culture and the body.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Heide is an epic poem about history, painting, painters, patrons and the people who made art happen in Australia — from Louis Buvelot to Edith Rowan, Tom Roberts and Robert Streeton to Vassilief, Nolan, Tucker, Joy Hester, the Boyds, Mirka Mora, and Albert Namatjira, with a particular focus on the artists gathered around Sunday and John Reed at Heide in Melbourne.

'It is a poem that explores the influence of art and poetry on the psyche, and the influence of social class on both, from the upper echelons and industrialists of Melbourne, to the struggle of the working class through such artists as Alisa O’Connor, Noel Counihan and Yosl Bergner. It begins with the foundation of Melbourne, and in its epic scope traverses an encyclopaedic range of subjects, assembled from facts, quotations, proverbs, definitions, historical documents, newspaper accounts and the author’s own reminiscences. 

'Heide is about the poets and artists who put their lives on the line, the Australian preoccupation with landscape, the dominance of a masculinist aesthetic, the sidelining and denigration of Indigenous art, the struggle of women artists to assert their influence and presence, and the impact of migration on Australian culture. 

'It is a long poem made up of almost 300 poems, each bringing to life characters and incidents that are fleshed out in vivid detail and with a dramatic intensity unique in Australian poetry.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The House of Youssef is a collection of short stories set in Western Sydney. The stories explore the lives of Lebanese migrants who have settled in the area, circling around themes of isolation, family and community, and nostalgia for the home country. In particular, House of Youssef is about relationships, and the customs which complicate them: between parents and children, the dark secrets of marriage, the breakable bonds between friends. The stories are told with extreme minimalism — some are only two pages long — which heightens their emotional intensity.

'The collection is framed by two soliloquies. The first expresses the longing of an old man for the homeland he will never return to. The second is the monologue of a woman, who could be his wife, addressed to her daughter, about life and its disappointments. The two central sequences are composed of vignettes which focus on moments of domestic crisis, and which combine, in the title sequence, to chart the demise of a single family. Kassab portrays the lives of ordinary people — simple, unglamorous, down-to-earth. Her understated style isolates small details and the anxieties that lurk within them. The tiny shifts in a normal day are an entire world to the people at the centre of her stories.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.