Cirrus@Austlit

'I Shed My Skin, A Furneaux Islands Story evolved out of an exhibition of Jane Giblin’s artwork which toured Tasmania in 2019. It revolves around strangers who come to a remote land and learn how to win a living from it. Traditions and relationships to the Furneaux Islands, built since the 1890s, were consolidated across five generations. During the latter part of the twentieth century significant changes had to be met. 

'Giblin travelled up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia interviewing her father’s cousins in addition to some senior Furneaux community members. She knew there was art to be made and stories to tell from their island lives. She sought memories of her great grandparents, feelings about the islands, and farming and birding as well as how they were acclimatizing to changed land access and tradition due to successful land rights claims by local First Nations people. 

'Giblin’s part-collaborator on her exhibition and book is retired lecturer in geography and well-known Tasmanian writer, Pete Hay. Hay accompanied Giblin on some of her visits to people and island places of significance; his wit, grit and heart providing a rich sounding board. His poetry and prose add significantly to Jane’s observations and artwork in this beautifully presented publication.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'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)

'Pete Hay on colonial and industrial dreaming, and the obliteration - and inevitability - of memory.'

'The chapbook is the ideal public presentation of poetry for the times in which we live. It is even more portable than the conventionally slim collection; its humbler production values permit poets to get their work ‘out there’, thereby meeting the democratic criterion of accessibility for both poet and reader, and it is conducive to the rigours of thematic focus that a small body of work encourages. Long may it flourish.' (Introduction)

'From a poet normally regarded as “fiercely Tasmanian”, this collection is a startling departure from Pete Hay, but no less observant, subtle or incisive than any of his better known work. The centrepiece of Girl Reading Lorca is a celebration of the life and poetry of Federico García Lorca. With a voice as sure as that with which he speaks of the landscapes of Tasmania, Pete sensitively evokes the haunted fields, mountains, and cities of Andalusia in these extraordinary poems.

'Girl Reading Lorca also contains an extended cycle of poems, collectively titled ‘Madrid, June 19, 2011’. These were the centrepiece of Indignados!, an exciting musical collaboration with Spanish guitarist Paul Gerard. In these poems, Pete tunes his eye for injustice and absurdity, writing of civil unrest in Madrid, set against Spain’s deep history and culture. He makes us see Europe not as ignorant tourists but as intelligent, questioning observers looking back on the old world from a curious corner of the new one.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.