'Sun Music collects Beveridge’s best poems published over a thirty-year period, from 1987 to 2017. She has selected the poems from her award-winning collections, The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey, and included 33 new poems which build on and enhance her previous work. Beveridge is an exacting poet, precise and controlled, and her formal discipline gives added intensity to her expression of emotion. The combination of clarity and dramatic force, involving a supple use of language which registers the ebb and flow of feeling, makes her poetry immediately appealing and accessible. As she notes in her introduction to this collection, ‘My writing can be kaleidoscopic, often baroque, but I hope also grounded and focused…I am drawn to poetry that has rich texture, and by this, I mean poetry that is distinctly metaphorical, detailed, musically complex, but also clear.’'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication:
In loving memory
Vera Newsom, 1912-2006
Dorothy Porter, 1954-2008
Martin Harrison, 1949-2014
and Bandit, 1999-2016
'Judith Beveridge tells us what she is. In the introduction to her collection Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, she describes herself as a lyrical poet, and discusses her belief that poetry must be a “showdown between the word and the poet” (xv). ' (Introduction)
'Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry and throughout her writing life she has received multiple awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. As a teacher of creative writing at Sydney University and the University of Newcastle as well as the poetry editor of Meanjin, Beveridge is undoubtedly one of Australia’s most engaged, dedicated and supportive writers.' (Introduction)
'Judith Beveridge tells us what she is. In the introduction to her collection Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, she describes herself as a lyrical poet, and discusses her belief that poetry must be a “showdown between the word and the poet” (xv). ' (Introduction)
'The appearance of a New and Selected Poems by a widely loved and admired poet has all the pleasures of a major retrospective, but viewed alone, without the clamour of a gallery event. It’s in the nature of retrospective to raise the banner of analysis-as-public-spectacle. What does this art mean to us, and how is it unique? The artist’s own words form part of the context for understanding the lifelong happening that is the body of work. It seems fitting, then, that Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and selected poems opens with an extended author’s note.' (Introduction)
'In one sense, Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poemscan be seen as a replacement for Hook and Eye: A Selection of Poemspublished in 2014 in the Braziller series. That wasn’t, I suppose, a true Selected, more a brief introduction (it runs to just under a hundred pages) for those unacquainted with Beveridge’s work. Sun Music has a slightly exiguous feeling as well: one hundred and seventy pages chosen from her earlier books and a nearly book-length collection of new poems which provides the book’s title.' (Introduction)
'Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry and throughout her writing life she has received multiple awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. As a teacher of creative writing at Sydney University and the University of Newcastle as well as the poetry editor of Meanjin, Beveridge is undoubtedly one of Australia’s most engaged, dedicated and supportive writers.' (Introduction)
