Cirrus@Austlit

'Earlier this year Rodney Hall published a new novel, A Stolen Season, which has been well received, and which will renew interest in his gifts as a fiction writer. As with his previous novels, including Just Relations (1982), Captivity Captive (1989), and Love without Hope(2008), Hall deploys his vivid style to create a morally engaged study of characters who are caught in states of psychological and emotional intensity. While Hall’s novels are themselves not as known as they should be, it is his significant body of work as a poet, consisting of a dozen collections from 1962 to 2002, which is especially forgotten. The interest around Hall’s new novel gives us the occasion to look again at his poetic oeuvre, which was once thought to be among the most outstanding in Australia but which now is seldom discussed or anthologized, and remains out-of-print.'  (Introduction)