Cirrus@Austlit

'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.

'An oriole sings to a dying father. A bleeding-heart dove saves the day. A crow wakes a woman’s resolve. Owls help a boy endure isolation. Cockatoos attend the laying of the dead. Always there are birds in these linked stories that pay homage to kindness amidst loss, grief, discord and displacement, from Australia to the Philippines, across cultures and species. When we encounter that snag in the breath, that shadow of a wing, we hope to remember kindness. 

'Kindness cannot self-isolate. It moves both ways and all ways, like breath.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'This is the story of a creative reading-writing workshop that I piloted in 2009 with three students on responding to a text and a life from an/other culture through the poem ‘The Story I would Have Wanted To Tell you You Had I Met You Yesterday’ (Reyes, 1990), which embedded ‘an aesth-ethics’ in meeting the other’s story. I reference philosopher George Steiner’s concept of aesthetic engagement as ‘the meeting of freedoms’ in artistic production and reception (1989) in conversation with my past and ongoing formulations on aesthetics and ethics that take off from Philippine indigenous beliefs.'  (Introduction)

'The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. after four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But between, the port hopes: 'there could be accidents of kindness here.' In her latest collection of poetry, award-winning author Merlina Bobis traces the accidents of art and life. Drawing on the journal of Pigafetta whose writings have become an accident of history, Merlinda Bobis composes with an attuned ear and her poems are rich with imagery; with breath and heart.'  (Publication summary)

A construct of inter-related 'creative artefacts' and critical analyses of the transnational story hub, created as an inter-related text between Spain (Vigo) and Australia (Wollongong).