Cirrus@Austlit

'With poems ranging from the confessional to the mock-autobiographical, from imagism to a strange storytelling, from the comic and satirical to the plangent and disturbing, Star Struck startles us with the many faces of lyric poetry.

'This book of poems by the award-winning poet David McCooey is made up of four sections. The first documents an alienating encounter with a life-threatening illness. The second plays out an unforgettable obsession with darkness and light. The third brings together popular music and the ancient literary mode of the pastoral. In this highly original sequence we find, among other things, Bob Dylan singing Virgil, Joni Mitchell reflecting on life in Laurel Canyon, a lab monkey pondering the sound of music, and a bitter, surreal rewriting of ‘Down Under’ for our times. In the final section, narrative poetry is cast in an intensely new and uncanny light.' (Publication summary)

'Melbourne Journal: Notebooks 1998-2003 is the third instalment in Alan Loney’s notebooks, covering the period in between his previous publications (Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976-1991 and Crankhandle: Notebooks June 2010–November 2013).

'Allowing observations and ideas to fall on to the page half formed, poems to shimmer into and out of existence like apparitions, Alan Loney’s Melbourne Journal celebrates the reflexive muscle of the poet’s mind, heightened by the stimuli of a new place: Melbourne.' (Publication summary)

'Our Lady of the Fence Post is an imaginative response to news reports of the appearance of a Marian apparition on the construction site of a memorial for victims of the Bali bombing at Coogee, Sydney, in January 2003.

'One year after 9/11, terrorists had bombed Paddy’s Irish Pub and the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians. Within days of the report of the Marian apparition huge crowds started visiting the site, dubbed ‘Our Lady of the Fence Post’ by the press.

'Our Lady of the Fence Post tells the story of the ‘war on terror’, from the Bali bombing to ISIS suicide bombing in 2015, from the point of view of locals in the fictional setting of Sunshine Bay, in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs' (Publication summary)

'With each change of poetic clothes, at each moment, [Dawe] displays us ironically, satirically, good-humouredly to ourselves, with a warmth and sadness for humanity's follies.' - Thea Astley, Three Australian Writers

'Bruce Dawe is that rare phenomenon, a natural poet with a superlative feeling for language.' - Geoffrey Lehmann, The Bulletin

'...in him we have an individual and passionately perceptive writer whose work has already assumed its proper territory and whose terms are directed from the heart as well as the mind.' - Judith Wright, Poetry No. 4  ' (Publication summary)