Cirrus@Austlit

'The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.'

Source: Abstract

'Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.'  (Introduction)

'A living songbook more than four years in the making, Andrew Ford’s hymnal brings together the words of sixteen contemporary Australian writers – poets, essayists and folksingers – in songs of praise, awe, grief, hope, joy, and natural splendour, dedicated not to a god, but to the land.

'The ever-daring voices of Luminescence Chamber Singers join forces with two rising stars: Hilary Geddes, 2021 Freedman Jazz Fellow and lead guitarist of Triple J favourites The Buoys, and category-defying cellist Freya Schack-Arnott. Red Dirt Hymns unfolds to the evocative imagery of Sammy Hawker, whose art is created within the fabric of country itself: saltwater, limestone and eucalypt.

'From Ellen van Neerven’s dark clouds to John Kinsella’s abundant gardens, Red Dirt Hymns does what a hymnal is meant to do: it draws us closer – to each other, and to the light and shade of our wide brown land.'

Source: Canberra International Music Festival.

With a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’).' (Introduction)

'Illness memoir is based on a tension between the general and the particular. The writer presents (to use a medical term) as both representing all sufferers of a particular malady – in this case, myeloma – and a unique individual experiencing a specific, unrepeatable event. Peter Goldsworthy, who is both a GP and a prize-winning writer, is better equipped than most to engage with this tension.' (Introduction) 

'To fall is to be human. We fall in love, fall asleep, and fall from grace. And in this epoch that we have called the Anthropocene, we are witnessing nothing less than the fall of nature.

'This extraordinary collection, the fifth by the prize-winning poet David McCooey, covers the full tragicomic spectrum of falling: from pratfalls to tragic demises, from accident-prone parents to ruinous celebrities.

'Within its unifying thematic focus, The Book of Falling is tonally and formally diverse, attending with great artistry to the calamities and absurdities of history and the contemporary world. The collection comprises of satires and elegies, inventive poetic autofictions and biofictions, and innovative photopoems, employing found photos and photographs by the author. This is a collection that welcomes its readers, even as it plunges them into new ways of understanding the beautiful, fallen worlds that we inhabit.' (Publication summary)

'Sarah Holland-Batt’s Fishing for Lightning is a book about Australian poetry. As such, it is a rare, and welcome, bird in the literary ecology of our country. It is welcome because poetry, like any other art form, requires a supportive culture that educates and promulgates. Not that Holland-Batt, herself one of our leading poets, is ‘merely’ didactic, or a shill for the muses. Holland-Batt, who is also an academic, writes with great authority and insight, and she is a fine stylist, penning essays that are packed with humour and playfulness. These essays cater for all kinds of audiences, from newcomers to poetry experts, which is no small feat.'  (Introduction)

'Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a poetics is visible in the central role that material dirt (as both pollution and terrain) plays in Kinsella’s work, as well as the more general concept of impurity, as seen in Kinsella’s poetic trafficking in ideas concerning transgression, liminality, hybridity, and danger. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” In the poem “Dirt” (from Kinsella’s 2014 collection Sack), dirt remains understandable as matter out of place, but it also becomes radically mobile, its material and symbolic weight subject to unexpected transformations. The eponymous dirt in Kinsella’s poem is being carted from one place to another by the poet’s near neighbour for “purposes unknown.” This “shitload of dirt,” dumped onto the dirt of the valley’s floor, makes its way into the disturbingly porous bodies – both human and non-human – around it. It is “something you sense in arteries” and “the haze / that lights and encompasses us all.” This poem can be taken as a metonym for Kinsella’s entire literary oeuvre. Employing his “poetics of dirt,” Kinsella attends to the dispossessed dirt of a post/colonial nation; the dirt of contemporary farming practices; the dirt of official and vernacular languages; and the dirt of personal secrets. This essay argues that Kinsella’s “poetics of dirt” cannot be disambiguated from his activist poetics, and the profoundly auto/biographical nature of his writing. Attending to postcolonial theory and life-writing studies, this essay analyses how Kinsella thematises dirt as central to both life writing (in prose and poetry) and a life of writing. In doing so, it considers dirt as something not simply “out of place,” but – in a postcolonial, post-sacred, and late-capitalist world – endlessly mobile, unstable, and transformative, moving between material and discursive realities in newly complex ways. By attending to dirt (both as matter and as pollutant) within the context of his various auto/biographical projects, Kinsella conspicuously draws attention to the relationship between the human and the material, profoundly questioning – in a way akin to a “new materialist” perspective – the consequences of a human-centred ontology. At its most radical, the “poetics of dirt” found in Kinsella’s life writing posits a world in which human subjectivity is not the only agental force in the material world.' (Publication abstract)