Cirrus@Austlit

'Where is home? Where is my place? Would I feel at home in the place of my ancestors, or is my place this invaded, colonised country, where I’ve mostly lived? In these poems, I journey to Scotland, to the moors of Northumberland, seeking a genetic thread. I think I’ve found my people, ‘but it was only the whiskey’. Home again, through rivers, the lake and the sea. The dry bush, Queensland, are washed in images of water. I dig at the roots of colonisation, the blackbirder William Boyd, who left his mark on a coast that I love, a wild, quiet place with a violent history. A centre, a heart-place is identified, only to be devastated by fire and flood, the onslaught of climate change. Virginia Shepherd’s illustrations, her strange primordial fish, are a pause, a counterpoint, a reflection on nature and transience.' (Publication summary)

'I will be home, or maybe not when you arrive.

The soup is in the empty fridge; just warm it up.

A ghost of lettuce and a spectre of some buttercup,

there should be something, maybe nothing, to contrive.

'Not much to do about that cough, should it persist,

and settle in the guest room, should it still exist.

Watch some TV, there’s nothing on unless there is,

and read this book with missing pages – hers and his.' (Publication summary)

'The Leaving features poems mostly written in the past decade, covering the author’s move from the city to the country, new challenges, relationships, landscapes and loves. Poems written with humour and in sorrow, with joy and passion, with incredulity and awe. Sometimes clear-eyed and disturbingly real, sometimes utterly fantastic, containing portraits of painters and politicians, of children paddling canoes, of a doomed lyricist writing songs on the road, of a lover pleading with his girlfriend to stay, and finally of life in the shadow of Covid. Just one person’s life in the 21^st century.'  (Publication summary)

'Sarah St Vincent Welch’s chalk borders is playful and soulful, and explores borders, frames and boundaries. chalk borders includes spare poems engaging with places from her #litchalk practice, where she chalks poems on the footpaths at art festivals in an ekphrasis of place, treating the whole environment as an artwork. These and longer poems engage with the tenuous lines drawn between art and life, the animate and inanimate, inside and outside, and present and past. chalk borders is inhabited by a love of existence and hope.' (Publication summary)

'This Anthology contains the work of established poets alongside emerging and local poets - mainly from the North Shore of Sydney. It is designed to capture the shape and feeling of the regular Poetry Nights held at Rubino's Italian restaurant in Willoughby. The Poetry Nights and this anthology have evolved under the aegis of the North Shore Poetry Project which started life in May 2012 with one of Australian Poetry's Café Poets, Philip Porter, as the poet-in-residence. The aim of the Project is to bring the best of Australian poets to the district and to provide a space for emerging and local poets to perform their works.' –Page [8].

'The poets of Canberra (and its region) differ widely in techniques and preoccupations. There has never been and 'Canberra School' as such, though Les Murray once bestowed on the poets of this city and region that unhelpful appellation. There has been no pressure on the poets here to represent Canberra's cityscape ‐ ot its surrounding landscapes. Most of the poets sampled write in their own versions of free verse (including a kind of loose iambic). Others consider that the traditional recources of strict metre and formal rhyme are far from exhausted. A few are involved with English version of Japanese forms, such as tanka and haiku. Partly through monthly readings at The Gods Cafe (and its predecessors over many years), most Canberra poets are more than aware of their contemporaries around the country and submit their poems widely to national newspapers, journals and e‐zines.

'The anthology begins with a single indicative poem from each of the now‐deceased poets who established Canberra's poetic tradition. The differing space allowed to living poets reflects, to a considerable degree, the numbers of collections they have published. It's also based on our assessment of what was submitted to us as their best work. In most cases there are enough poems for the reader to form a preliminary sense of the poet's preoccupations and technical range.' (Publication summary)

'Selected poems of Yogjakarta poet, Iman Budhi Santosa, published in English for the first time presented in a parallel text pocket book format.' (Publication summary)