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y separately published work icon The Garden of Earth : The Murray Darling selected work   poetry  
Alternative title: The Garden of Earthly Sorrows
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 The Garden of Earth : The Murray Darling
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Garden of Earth is told in Thirty Five Books. Each canto is a long-breathed sentence that takes you in its flow. They gather all the hues of nature, history, culture and philosophy like metaphorical rivers gathering majestic detritus. It invites us to consider the plenitude of the world, but also how precious and precarious a thing this is. Homer Rieth's first epic Wimmera gave voice to the history, legend and folklore of the Wimmera region of north western Victoria, and to ideas of 'place' and 'country' not only as cultural markers, but as ciphers of an enduring mythos. In his new companion epic, he turns his gaze to the larger arena of the Murray Darling, to this oldest of continents more broadly. He offers a vision of the natural environment and the human world as bound together on a global scale. The Garden of Earth is a hymn to and argument in defence of the future of the planet. It is the poet's final assay of our age-old dream vision of the world, only here it is as something at once luminous and exceptionally Australian.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  • Dedication: For Ruby


    Epigraph: From the garden of Heaven a western breeze

    Blows through the leaves of my garden of earth 

    -Hafiz, The Divan, VII

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Fitzroy North, Fitzroy - Collingwood area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Black Pepper , 2016 .
      image of person or book cover 2643455716800896656.jpg
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      Extent: 600p.
      Note/s:
      • Published: 15th November 2016
         

      ISBN: 9781876044893

Works about this Work

Review Short: Homer Rieth’s The Garden of Earth R. D. Wood , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 August vol. 82 no. 2017;

'You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible. In poetics, it is not a stretch to suggest that there is a heuristic, ascendant, paradigmatic separation between those in a transnational sphere sipping turmeric lattes and those authentic patriots tilling the soil. This fault line, which is, of course, anachronistic and dialectical, exists in the selected texts and influences as well as the paratextual selling points that tell us something is ‘traditional’ or ‘experimental’, ‘Romantic or ‘modern’, ‘country’ or ‘city’; in what claim ‘this is Australian’.' (Introduction)

Review Short: Homer Rieth’s The Garden of Earth R. D. Wood , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 August vol. 82 no. 2017;

'You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible. In poetics, it is not a stretch to suggest that there is a heuristic, ascendant, paradigmatic separation between those in a transnational sphere sipping turmeric lattes and those authentic patriots tilling the soil. This fault line, which is, of course, anachronistic and dialectical, exists in the selected texts and influences as well as the paratextual selling points that tell us something is ‘traditional’ or ‘experimental’, ‘Romantic or ‘modern’, ‘country’ or ‘city’; in what claim ‘this is Australian’.' (Introduction)

Last amended 26 Jun 2018 10:51:37
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