AustLit

'Shifting Windows is a tight selection of Geoff Page’s travel poems published since 1986, most of them drafted on trains in Europe but with a smaller number set in South Korea, India and New Zealand. Page has always been acutely aware of the ironies of history. Many of these poems are therefore suitably sardonic; a few, however, remain defiantly lyrical. All are in eight lines of rhyming tetrameter, a form which Page has found seductively congenial for more than twenty-five years. Note: most of these pieces have appeared in Geoff’s chapbooks, so if you’ve already bought them, there won’t be all that much that’s new. If you haven’t, you’ll really enjoy the wry humour and trenchant observation.' (Publisher's abstract)

This book of resonant, assured and rewarding poems come from a true connection with a lived place where nature and the human-made habitat intertwine in ways that are not always easy. Rachael Mead has a gift for compassion and intimate detail leavened with self-irony and poised regard for the places she inhabits or moves through, the beings, human and non-human, she encounters, and the elements and dangers she lives with. Empathetic without sentimentality, Mead has found all the material she needs for poetry in her own vicinity: the mutability of life, the histories that have made us, and the responsibility we bear for what we’ve done to our places. Mead also treasures language and deftly uses its resources of metaphor, narrative, voice and syntax to explore her Sixth Creek and its surrounds and offer readers far distant from it some new knowledge about the world. (Publication abstract)

'In Blind Spots, Bruce Dawe turns his ironic wit and poetic skills to dramatize the unexpected termination of Kevin Rudd as our PM, Julia Gillard’s subsequent term of office, and Kevin Rudd’s return. Dawe’s sympathy for those subjected to the intense pressure of political office during these troubled times is evident through his tongue-in-cheek depiction of both Kevin and Julia.' (Publisher's blurb)