'When an inland tsunami floods the foothills of a mountain city, a woman survives the inundation of her home, alone. This edgy, potent verse novel circles the scene like the cadaver dog whose work it is to search for those who are missing. Reimagining traditions of bush gothic and outback horror, Luke Best crafts a terrifying and acute psychological portrait of grief and guilt. Loss, cowardice and trauma pulse through this singular and uncompromising narrative of ecological and personal disaster.' (Publication summary)
'Cadaver Dog demands to be read again and again.'
'In 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’ For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans’ division from a utopian natural world suggests the biblical fall, strike a chord in our own time of unfolding environmental catastrophe. Against such an unfolding, three new Australian books of poetry explore the contemporary relationship of subject to place.' (Introduction)
'In 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’ For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans’ division from a utopian natural world suggests the biblical fall, strike a chord in our own time of unfolding environmental catastrophe. Against such an unfolding, three new Australian books of poetry explore the contemporary relationship of subject to place.' (Introduction)
'Cadaver Dog demands to be read again and again.'
