'Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan’s most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.
'A precise language of environmental observation is braided into stories of family and kin networks. Careful descriptions of place anchor this collection in ecological watchfulness. Birds are sentinel to environmental change, and symbols of spiritual transformation. Song in the Grass includes over sixty different species of endemic or migratory Australian birds.
'Archival practices of all kinds ― what one poem describes as 'a lyrical index' ― offer touchstones for this sonically rich collection, in which poetry becomes a way of sustaining love over distance, a collective music, and a compass for navigating in-common emergencies.' (Publication summary)
'Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.' (Introduction)
'The compulsion to make lists is not purely of diagnostic interest to psychologists or the domain of scientists and accountants but also a potent and complex poetic mode. Song in the Grass, Kate Fagan’s first collection of poems in more than 10 years, brings lists, hymns, elegies and lyrics into an enlivening, idiosyncratic conversation.' (Introduction)
'The compulsion to make lists is not purely of diagnostic interest to psychologists or the domain of scientists and accountants but also a potent and complex poetic mode. Song in the Grass, Kate Fagan’s first collection of poems in more than 10 years, brings lists, hymns, elegies and lyrics into an enlivening, idiosyncratic conversation.' (Introduction)
'Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.' (Introduction)
