'Like its precursor Barnacle Rock, Brief Garden is a collection of poems largely concerned with environmental degeneration and loss. The title poem deals with the ephemeral nature of a civilisation and its artefacts, but the focus of the collection goes deeper, playing on the word “brief”, the vanishing of an Edenic garden. Today, our world is further threatened by anthropogenic climate change, oil-mining assaults on natural wonders, flora and fauna, and by continued government intervention into the preservation of heritage buildings and sites. The land tended by Australia’s first inhabitants for 60,000 years is now under siege. In these beautifully crafted and researched poems, voices from the past and present remind readers of what has been taken away.' (Publication summary)
'A few months ago, I was talking with a translator, both of us marvelling at what a bastard language English is. The sheer weight of words from 100 sources, the way words with very different meanings can sound exactly the same and how others can vary in their context. This is a writer’s delight. The book we’re here to celebrate today is Brief Garden. I didn’t realise until well into the book that the title comes from a twist around an actual Brief Garden arising from a legal brief but the phrase so perfectly sums up all that this book is about.' (Introduction)
'A few months ago, I was talking with a translator, both of us marvelling at what a bastard language English is. The sheer weight of words from 100 sources, the way words with very different meanings can sound exactly the same and how others can vary in their context. This is a writer’s delight. The book we’re here to celebrate today is Brief Garden. I didn’t realise until well into the book that the title comes from a twist around an actual Brief Garden arising from a legal brief but the phrase so perfectly sums up all that this book is about.' (Introduction)
