Cirrus@Austlit

'Based on the Japanese collaborative poetic form, Renga: 100 Poems is a co-authored book by Australian poet John Kinsella and American poet Paul Kane. Each poem in the book, written across a decade, replies to a previous one by the other poet, creating a rich and layered texture of meaning and effect. 

'Using a call and response format, the two poets explore the similarities and differences encountered in their mirror lives, as each has spent years living in the other's country and is deeply engaged in both Australian and American literature. As both poets live in rural areas and have been concerned with ecological issues, many of the poems focus on the global environmental crisis, but the various thematic threads that make up this book weave a complex pattern that deepens and transforms over the course of the book.'  (Publication summary)

'Petra White's poetry is distinctive for its sharp and unusual imagery, its authoritative expressions of the inner life and its existential preparedness and irony. Mythic imagination and narrative are at the heart of this book, her fourth collection. The ancient Book of Ezekiel is the unlikely source for a compact epic, "How the Temple was Built". Playful in its invention, this poem is terrifying and poignant. The Bible account is reinvented through a secular lens, touching on familiar concerns: war, displacement and feminism. The old epic tropes - love, death, faith, despair - drive this story. White's myth-making here explores the limits of being human and the limits of being a god. The second section, "Landscapes" is thirteen sketches of human solitariness, featuring ancient mythic figures and anonymous modern ones. Unobtrusively presented landscapes, at times hyper-real, or shading to dream, interpolate the characters. These incursions into psyche are fluid and metamorphic. Each singular poem crackles with impulse, marking iconic stillness and strange beauty. Reading for a Quiet Morning, which also includes several spirited versions of Rilke, is Petra White's most daring collection to date.' (Publication Summary)

'This is not a book of high mathematics: rather, an attempt to migrate some of the innate robustness, austerity and elegance of Euclidean thought into the realm of poetic structure. Albiston's formal experiments do not function as mere theory, dry equation or games, but authentic poetic events, at the same time harmoniously familiar, and strange' (Introduction)

'These poems were written while [Brophy] was poet in residence at the Australia Council's B.R. Whiting Library in Rome. ' (Publication summary)

'Readers of Aileen Kelly's earlier books will recognise that in these final poems she is at the height of her power. The poems are abrupt, distilled and beautifully rhythmed. Life is her object and her passion, as always. The language has the essential autonomy of poetry, and yet these poems are directly personal, involving family and friends, their bodies and her own, and her own experience among delicately defined landscapes. Inevitably, it seems, poem after poem is also metaphysical, and socially aware. Perhaps the briefest description, however, is the best: here is wit and imagination.' (Publication Summary)

'In Universal Mother, Elif Sezen braids the intersections of domestic histories and spiritual evolution. She navigates the large themes: complementary concepts of separation and homecoming, visible and invisible, eternity and temporality, love and grief, irony and melancholy.

'The world these poems conjure is one of imagination and mystical longing. The poet’s mother and the poet herself, as feminine, are the departure point for the persona in these poems, journeying haunted and at times ecstatic through surprising venues and occasions.

'As myth-making for a self, and as social understanding, Elif Sezen’s imagery in this book bridges the personal and the collective, in a special sense. Reflecting upon her own transcultural identity, this work carries itself across boundaries between East and West.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The phrase ‘have been and are’ is taken from the last sentence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species – ‘Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved’ – and the poems in Brook Emery’s fifth collection are attentive to the implied puzzles of evolution and beauty, fixity and flux. Imagined as ‘transactions’ between readers and writers across time the loosely-linked poems, all of whose titles bar one are quotations, tangle and untangle the interlacings of nature, language, culture and identity in an attempt to discover ‘ground on which to stand’.

'Full of allusions, sometimes personal, sometimes bemused, often reflective and speculative, the poetry is consistently lucid, lyrical and tactile; it thinks through the eye, the ear, the body’s engagement with the world:

'‘… So, I pass through bush, I tread upon;

'I am within the sea, wrapped round, held … ’'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In this book-length poem, (which starts in a manner reminiscent of Beckett’s Company), the isness of voice is its central preoccupation: it is considered from as many different aspects as there are parts to this multiform poem. Highly exploratory, with words sometimes rising from or inspired by selected Renaissance wood-cut engravings, Anatomy of Voice is divided into four Partitions – across which are lyricised the shiftings of the question ‘what is a voice’, and the poem’s speculative and evocative answers.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.