Cirrus@Austlit

'Love—ancient and modern, ecstatic and mundane, sacred and profane—finds its Australian voice between the covers of this book.

'This important collection of new poems displays the richness and variety of contemporary Australian poetry. Here is larrikin love, ironic love and the understated love we inhabit.

'Australian Love Poems 2013 is a who’s who of Australian poets. It containing 200 poems from 173 Australian poets including well known poets Les Murray, Judith Beveridge, Cate Kennedy, Robert Gray, Paul Kelly and exciting new poetic talent.

'This is how we do love, how we fall in and out of it, yearn and turn and hurt in it, and how love leads us beyond ourselves. And this is how we write love: in sonnets, of course, pantoums, villanelles, haiku, ghazals, prose poems, free verse and aubades.

'The richness of love found in Australian Love Poems 2013 claims Australia as a poetic nation and a nation of love.' (Publisher's blurb)

''With its beer-drenched Blundstones, cricket balls retrieved from neighbour's backyards, misbehaving pastor's kids and crabs plucked from the Moyne river, O'Reilly's poetry collects and curates a series of vernacular objects and experiences that comprise life in Australia and beyond. From the streets of Ballarat to the dry highways of West Texas, from the floor of a petrol station in rural NSW to the evening sky seen from a Scottish beach, this poetry traverses continents, testing spaces and locations and finding them brimming with their own types of desire. Using a light touch and an elegant voice, Distance traces out nostalgia's peculiar contours and emotional resonances, resulting in remarkable poetic moments that will return and whisper again to a reader even after the book is set down.' - Lachlan Brown, author of Limited Cities 'Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel laureate, once remarked that memory and art have in common the "ability to select, a taste for detail". In the work of Nathanael O'Reilly, memory and art come together to bring us poems that remember what cannot - what must not - be forgotten, in rich and telling detail and with a taste for quiet but incisive irony.' - Paul Kane, author of A Slant of Light, Work Life and Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity 'Nathanael O'Reilly's poems sound the major themes of Australian poetry: landscape, displacement, yearning, and above all a critique of cultural narrowness. O'Reilly's plain-spoken diction is often laced with understated wit, but is given ballast by its principled grounding in lived experience.' - Nicholas Birns, editor of Antipodes' (Publication summary)