Cirrus@Austlit

'The 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season has seen unprecedented destruction - to homes, lives, and the eucalypt forests and bushlands that are inseparable from our identity as Australians. Most heartrending has been the destruction wrought on our wildlife, the habitats which sustain and shelter them, reduced to ashen deserts.

'In response, the Australian poetry community has risen and given voice to the anguish, the struggle, and the challenge of this catastrophe. Poets from across the country, and indeed, from around the world, some renowned, some known only in their own backyards, or local libraries, have risen up with a shared voice; from the ashes, they say, we rise.

All proceeds from this book will be donated to wildlife rescue and bushfire relief charities.'(Publication summary)

'Caesar Seetham, former financial consultant and erstwhile poet, is reported by his mercurial wife Sybil for breaching home quarantine, as a new, mutated strain of coronavirus sweeps the world. To her chagrin, she finds herself confined with him in the close quarters of The Sceptred Crown - a third rate corona hotel. While chaos reigns in the outside world, strange new symptoms emerge. Those infected with COVID-22 show few symptoms at first, except a tendency to gibber and babble in a kind of deranged and semi-poetic aphasia, before rapidly succumbing to silence, coma, haemorrhage and death. 

'While Caesar records his impressions of a world gone mad, Dr Mowbray, in charge at the Sceptred Crown, learns that a unique antibody in Caesar's blood could prevent the progress of the disease, leaving the infected, like Caesar, although trapped in a state of poetic aphasia, at least not declining into coma and death. For the process to succeed, Caesar must not only calmly and willingly give up his blood, but he must submit to having every drop drained, also giving up his life - the only way Mowbray will be able to extract enough antibodies to create a viable serum.

'While Caesar considers what his life is worth, Sybil is struck by even more disturbing symptoms, and if he can't even save the woman he loves, why the hell should he bother saving the world?'

Source : publisher's blurb

'When the neighbour's dog steals the Christmas chook, and Dad is selected to get it back, all sorts of trouble follows.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'C.S. Hughes combines the naive with the wonderful to create a book of poems full of charm, wit, laughter and magic. With the cadence of nursery rhyme, the conviction of prayer, the strangeness of myth and spell, it weaves a peculiar but charming magic. Peopled throughout with a sometimes amusing, sometimes obsessional, sometimes curious array of birds, cats, bears and stranger creatures.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A new collection of poems from C S Hughes, that tell tales barbarous and strange. Of water witches and dead roads, kings of owls and beggarly crows, dubious merchants, three time losers, lost sailors and lost souls, the drunk the brazen and the brave, and much else besides. Poems that tell tales, tales that tell poems. Whimsical, cruel, grim, surprising and strange.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Book Of Whimsies is a collection of gossamer thin poems in which you will find summer days and winter nights, dragonflies and storm borne kites, buttered scones and rusting tin, lost ships and weary hearts, green hills and untied shoes, cups of tea and sleepless nights, and floating above a benign and melancholy moon. The poems are whimsical, light, mysterious as whispers, sometimes sad, sometimes high, but nearly always told with the poignancy of loss, the echoes of love, and with the knowledge that a whim may just as easily lead to dark and unexpected consequences.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Death is a bottle green sea, and the wings of a moth, and the colour of winter strawberries, and driving hard toward fast approaching storms, and the fading scent of roses, and lace against the skin, and the rough voice of crows, and the smooth hide of umbrellas, flailing in the wind, and a voice in the silence, and much more besides.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Upon A Time A Tower Rose is a fairy story, a fable, a romance, an adventure, a poem and a mystery. Trapped in a tower in a valley by the sea a girl with a golden voice sings her heart out, guarded by large and noble bird. In a distant land driven by heartbreak and tragedy a young prince begins a quest in search of the girl with the golden voice. On the way he meets the self-satisfied, the villainous, the monstrous and the miraculous, and many a strange bird indeed.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'From poet C S Hughes a collection of tales of torment and trepidation, some more terrible than others. We begin with Cave Canem, a shaggy dog story, with a twist in the tail worthy of Hitchcock. Next a story about a Phantom that should not be read by pregnant women or the overly sensitive, or perhaps anyone. Then follows a peculiar exploration featuring the musings of two old soldiers, now gravediggers, and the philosophies that pull their strings while they contemplate a Ferris Wheel at a funeral. In quite a different vein follows Natalie, La Luna and I, the monologue of a monster, sex, surgery, murder, strange voices and a fire on a ghost train. Not to be outdone, Darkest Matters is a tale of an insane scientist that sets out to destroy not the world, but himself, becoming almost immortal in the process. In the title piece, Broke Down House, the reader becomes the malevolent spirit, haunting itself. Sad Susan follows some classic tropes of monsters, haunts and madhouses down well trodden but still eerie paths. The Empire Of Broken Eyes sees a con artist photographer in 1930s Sydney get his just deserts, and will perhaps leave the reader reluctant to cross that particular bridge again. The final story is one of everyday madness on a drought stricken outback farm. Then, for atmosphere, a few poetic pieces, including the Poe inspired tale of a graveyard dancer, Lord Bonyfoote, whom we can only pray will remain behind those gates.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A poem about memory, lost love, sea and sand, richly illustrated with photography and artwork by the author. Features a gallery of seaside photography taken at The Caves, Inverloch and Ventnor, Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia.' (Publication summary)

'If Edgar Allan Poe and Doctor Seuss got together and wrote a rhyme about something squishy, horrible and blue, it might have been something like this.' (Publisher's blurb)

'A kinetic poem, made of regret, and flowers and falling stars. Word, image, art, animation combine to create something new, moving, bright and sombre, mysterious and achingly familiar.' (Publisher's blurb)

'A kinetic poem, artwork, music, animation, exploring moments in the life and death of the sun bird.' (Publication blurb)

A small collection of poetry, artwork, animations, kinetic poems, and short stories.