AustLit

Keepers is highly entertaining and serious; there are brilliant flashes and reflections, ironic observations and a lot of humour. The poems form stories and portraits of recognisable and unrecognisable people who teach and study in a School of Arts. You may know them: the intense, the terse, the drugged and the eccentric. Upstairs is the Health and Safety Novelist, and The Face, a narcissistic academic; and down in the basement, in lower registers, Fish, the cleaner and print-room assistant, working away among the students, including Gillian the sculptor who is suddenly successful and Jess the writer who some have questioned. The ironic observations of Fish, flâneur and Go player, form a narrative underlying the poems. Interspersed throughout are figures from history: Balzac, Gentileschi, Shostakovich, Orlan, Klima… After the shadowy voices of The Well Mouth these poems by Salom have come up into the light.

'The Wing Collection presents a broad overview of the distinctive contribution Diane Fahey has made to Australian poetry over the course of thirty years. It offers extensive selections from her work on birds and insects, on the worlds of myth and story, and on meetings with river and sea. A search for spiritual touchstones guides her many-layered explorations of the mysteries of place, time, and transformation.' (Publication summary)

'In Sly Mongoose the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an ‘ordinary punter’, a beaver, a worried mother and a cyclist; and there is a sequence drawn from a diary of travel through an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly structured around a buried pun or near-pun; a further pair of poems deals with after-echoes, among his friends, of the passing of John Forbes. So there you go.' (Publication summary)

Slo-Mo Tsunami offers a typically wide range of poems covering personal, social, political, and religious issues.

Too much information can be hard to swallow.
Time will often tell when leads are hard to follow.

Evidence blows away when the earth is fallow.
Some seeds take. Some graves are shallow.

In this stunning, visionary collection, A. Frances Johnson offers cautionary threnodies that muse on environment and the endurance of theme park notions of the natural, in spheres poetic and beyond. This is a richly varied collection: among moving lyrics of loss are dystopian visions, such as the last living bird with its wings and vocal chords sludged by the oily depredations of Exxon Valdez, hummingbird drones indiscriminately raiding and killing, and hybrid bird-humans blurring the boundaries between nature and culture to survive.

The poems in When Sky Becomes the Space Inside Your Head are a series of lyrical meditations that play with the relationship of inner states to the outside world, of individuals to others. These poems are accessible, welcoming even as they present troubling ideas as flashes in the sideshow of the mind. Wright's lyricism is one that questions its own values, the possibility of transcendence, and of using words to try and achieve it. Even if the poems build toward transcendent gestures, on arrival they often manifest as a pleasant emptiness, the post-coital lull that follows the unruly intensity of poetic thought. The epiphany is often a return to the everyday.

Henry Darger was an untrained artist and a social isolate who was obsessed with little girls. When he died in Chicago in 1973 at the age of 81, his work was completely unknown. Now his work is hung in major international art galleries and his innovative use of materials places him in the pop art milieu. The poems in this book tell the story of his life.

'In late 1980 Laurie Duggan began writing the Blue Hills poems as a kind of respite from the 'poetry wars'. The series mostly spread itself out over a number of books running in parallel with other more ostensibly 'worthy' projects like The Ash Range and The Epigrams of Martial. These poems now gathered here are at the heart of what Duggan sees as his poetic work.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Towns in the Great Desert is a significant addition to the corpus of a major Australian poet. These poems make a significant claim for Boyle’s standing as one of Australia’s most important contemporary poets.' (Publisher's blurb)

T'ime and motion are undercurrents in these new poems by Sarah Day. Her subjects encompass the commonplace in the Australian landscape: the remnant beak of a raven, tree shadows in urban streets, industrial cranes and mowing-machines, as well as the exotic or peculiar: the world seed bank in Norway, artefacts in Pompeii, Graeco-Egyptian funeral portraits, the landscape paintings of John Glover, the Earth as seen from elsewhere in the Milky Way. These poems, individually and collectively, invite questions about the enigmatic nature of past, present and future.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Xn might be the shortest poem possible between two letters, a mathematical metaphor for poetry, shorthand for a process that takes something specific and transforms it into something more intensely itself.

'Jenkins’ second collection begins pre-big bang, and proceeds, democratically investigating life. Is she mining the everyday for the sake of linguistic high jinks, or hijacking language to celebrate where we’re at? Here we find a penchant for the absurd, a playful elucidation of everything from the concept of zero to the history of burnt toast, a subversion of historical methods, road trips and set theory, butter and death. Wry and lucid, wide-ranging and witty, this is exactly what you need to read.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The subject of this work is the author’s maternal great grandmother. Born in 1872, in St Just, Cornwall, Ethel emigrated to Australia at the age of fifteen. Beginning married life in a one-room tin shack outside Mildura, she published articles and her own collection of short stories, moving house frequently and raising six children along the way. These poems are compact and precise micro-portraits in verse. With characteristic adherence to formal, almost claustrophobic strictures set against an animate sense of buoyancy and breath, Albiston explores the tension between high poetic artifice and the small moments of an ordinary life.' (Publisher's blurb)

'With Signal Flare, Anthony Lawrence continues and extends the lyrical work that began with The Sleep of a Learning Man and which found sustained resonance in Bark.

'Six years in the making, Signal Flare showcases many of Lawrence’s hallmark stylistic flourishes: arresting inner music, dramatic clarity, and imagery that is often ‘cinematically tactile’ (the Poetry Archive). These poems highlight a number of abiding themes and concerns: human relationships; connections between the natural world and human involvement or intervention; clear, surreal evocations of place and character, and unusual, often indelible, depictions of weather and landscape.

'Signal Flare is Lawrence’s fourteenth collection of poems and contains his finest work to date.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Barnacle Rock is a collection of poems about battling against the odds. From the earliest explorers attempting to fill in the map of 'The Great South Land,' to our current failure to preserve our inherited environment, the protagonists find themselves, as the book's title might suggest, 'between a rock and a hard place.' Following on from Coast, this collection deepens our understanding of Australia's fraught history and poses important questions about the future.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Among the earlier concerns of Gould’s poems were the interplay of fate and free will, and the emergence of imagination as the natural companion to human lives. But his more recent work – as this collection shows– has turned to an intrigue with how enchantment locates itself in experience, where ‘self and lumen take their places’. Here in Capital, both in the poems and the comic opera libretto, Gould shows once more the confidence with which he can bring the resources of English prosody to illumine a sense of enchanted being that is very much his own poetic space.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Geoff Page’s New Selected Poems offers a tight but generous sample from more than forty years’ work by this major Australian poet. It does full justice to the poet’s extraordinary range of subject matter and poetic modes — from his pastoral origins to the city life he prefers, from Australian history and politics through to religion, from the quietly lyrical to the brutally satirical — while being never less than deeply enjoyable.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The Beautiful Anxiety continually breaks across boundaries of the intimate and the global in an invigorating and unsettling mix of materialist and speculative writing on the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the 21st century. The poems are in turn provocative, tender, impatient, playful, and swerve through the world, awake to its lostness as well as its ‘flesh and spark’.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Leaves of Glass is based on correspondence between Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Bernard O’Dowd (1866–1953). The letters, more than twenty of which have now been found, were written between 1899 and 1892. At that time, Whitman was at the end of his life and his career, and O’Dowd (whose first collection, Dawnward, would not be published until 1903) was a young legal librarian who wore a blade of grass in his lapel as a tribute to Whitman.' (Publisher's blurb)

'A wild ride across language, personalities and propositions that is ultimately about hope. These poems are often humorous and fierce, a mix of accessible and dense, concentrating on capturing the vernacular in unusual daily occurrences.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The Ladder is Simon West’s third collection of poetry, and his first in four years. Many earlier preoccupations return—the natural environment, Italian art, the dimensions of place. There is a new focus on worldly and artistic responsibility, and a fascination with the ‘certain poise’ of ‘being in between’. At the collection’s heart are the building blocks of language, along with the more literal ones of Rome, where some of these poems were written during a residency at the Whiting studio in 2012.' (Publication summary)

'Moving non-chronologically through youth and maturity, dreamscapes and time, Shari Kocher's long-awaited first collection charges the elusive music of cross-generational song-lines-mothers and daughters, daughters and grandmothers, lovers and kin-with the invisibles and intangibles of two decades spent honing her craft. This is a book about breathing. It is also about the changing contours of the journey home, even when the ground of what is meant by home seems most absent, impossible or undone. Rooted in place, yet animated by the immaterial, these poems breathe a body of living and loving alive. ' (Publication summary)