Cirrus@Austlit

'The collection: Forty verse and prose poems are divided into themes 'fire', 'sifting' and 'coast'.

'fire - the equal largest section with 15 poems primarily reflects my lived experience of the 'Black Summer' 2019-20 bushfires. My village of Lake Conjola was devastated when the Currowan Fire broke containment lines on New Year's Eve to destroy over 110 homes, with the loss of three lives. My devastated village became international news. Climate change destruction is a strong motif of poems in 'fire', as is living through the aftermath of a catastrophic bushfire disaster.

'sifting - these 10 poems cover a longer time span and are, in essence, reflections of a white, working class female growing up in southeast inland Australia and engaging with other places in the world. Some of the sub themes here contemplate inequality, war, travel, love and death.

'coast - here 15 poems reflect life on the fringe of southern Australia's coast. Included are longer prose poem narratives of moving between the east and west coasts. A sense of immersion exists in this group of poems, not just in the ocean, but in coastal environments across disparate Australian regions. Environmental and social concerns are engaged with in coast as well.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is a moving, involving account of a woman's fertility quest, and an inventive, carefully structured verse novel. The reader is drawn in to an emotional and physical ordeal across years of trying, miscarriage, and ultimately the gruelling IVF process. It voices an experience not often represented so thoroughly in literature - a lonely journey made more challenging by taboos, ignorance and prejudices.' Melinda Smith

'Ron C. Moss is a Tasmanian poet and artist whose haiku and short form poetry, has appeared in leading journals and anthologies across the world. His award-winning poems have been featured many times and translated into several languages. This is the fourth major collection of Rons previously published haiku, and it brings together work from more than twenty years of writing.'(Publication summary)

'unsettled' is a collection of broad thematic and formal range. Laing renders our history, our current ecological crisis and some of our contemporary mores into a rich, tumbling music, as memorable as it is accessible. The poems that revisit the author's past are especially poignant: closing some doors as the windows open to poetry's crisp, delicious air.' (Publication summary) 

'All three of the predominant themes of Geoff Goodfellow's substantial contribution to Australian literature run through this verse novella: the heroism of working class struggle, the tragedy of addiction and the celebration of love and sexual attraction.

'Geoff has always shown a concern for those abandoned youths who are left to navigate their way through the dysfunction wrought by alcohol, drugs and violence. 'Blight Street' continues Geoff's iconoclastic disregard for stale literary formalism, in order to allow his protagonists to relate their narratives in their own voices.'  (Publication summary)

'Australian poet Brendan Ryan speaks about his life in this memoir of "the child, the youth and the young man finding his footing amidst the mysteries of cows and the ruthless cycles of the farm, the dry-eyed melancholy of the milking-shed and the mercy of the weather. Here also are the puzzles of existence contained in parents and siblings, in small things and small talk, and the revelations of the school bus and the school. This is a classic memoir: Brendan Ryan's words come at us directly, and often with startling intensity, from indelible experience. And we feel his need to return." (Don Watson, 2020)' (Publication summary)

'As a serious intelligent child would, Rachael walks around her memory house: her mother, her relations, her island, its gothic history; and then one particular cut-off sweet lost relationship, which she re-visits again and again. Using old Kodak photos, particular moments become timeless. An unaffected book, the poems are serious, both in subject and use of language. It's rigorous, unsentimental. Rachael walks around sadness, doesn't dwell - but nor does she let go. And she's a mistress of the perfectly paced ending to a poem. A very unusual and truthful book.

'Maurice McNamara

'What makes us the creative person we become? Rachael Guy observes haunting incidents from her childhood that resonate decades later. A fresh, emotionally mature, insightful and compassionate voice for Australian poetry.

'Julie Chevalier' (Publication summary)

'Ryan draws poetry from the tough work of dairy farming and factories, poetry that transcends time and class, it's a joy to read this book, laced with dry humour and a complex humanity. Hard edged yet inviting. Ryan has a light touch and a gathering depth. 'The Lowlands of Moyne' is rich with living, an exciting and positive book, poetry
that glows in the darkness. -Robert Adamson ' (Publication summary)

'Field of Stars' is a new collection of haiku and senryu by Tasmanian poet Lyn Reeves.

'Pete Hay is pre-eminent among the guardians of Tasmania’s island’s spirit, his fierce intelligence and compassionate heart resisting those who would ravage, exploit and appropriate its natural beauty, cultural creativity and fraught history for profit and power. Animals and ancestors, people and plants, the lost and the loved, the humus and the human, the artist and the artefact, the books and the birds, the sadness and the stillness, the past and the possible, the humour and the horror all find voice in 'Forgotten Corners'. ' (Publication summary)

'This volume samples the poetry of twenty-five poets associated with the State of Victoria who were publishing significant work during the First World War. The collection is as much a social and cultural map of women’s attitudes and occupations as it is a poetry anthology. Short accounts of the poets’ lives and their publishing history provide insights into the way the War shaped their everyday concerns. The book expands common notions of what constitutes war poetry, and testifies to the social role and styles of poetry in general. These poets wrote at a time when poetry was a public art, as their work was widely published in the daily and weekly media as well as single volumes of the period and shortly thereafter.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Ron C. Moss's collection of exceptionally wrought haiku, tanka, and haibun in his new collection 'Bushfire Moon' offer elegantly recorded experiences of his long service in volunteer firefighting and rescue in Tasmania.' (Publication summary)

'‘Lyric poetry is the lightly orchestrated voice of true feeling. Its shape and its language persuade us, as readers, that soul or spirit has become fully incorporate. In Kristen Lang’s own words, again and again “we are all / this embrace”: all in her gathered moment of love or of loss. She has written of our inevitable transience, “the angels are not ourselves”, but these sure-footed poems locate personal apprehension in a physically delicate, common world. Readers will surely delight in the subtle, varied command of SkinNotes.’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe