Cirrus@Austlit

'About the artist: A slightly crazy performance poet, Keith has been delighting festival audiences for over 25 years. In concert, he interweaves original verse with bush poetry, presenting an amalgam of history, humour, and social comment that defies stereotype. This year Keith is launching his new book ‘Australia’s Lost Folk Songs’, and giving a theme presentation on The Folklore of Prejudice. He is also providing both beginner and advanced workshops on performance poetry and recitation.' (Publication summary)

'Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety.

'The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands.

'This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways.

'From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society.

'Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed.' (Publisher's blurb)

Allen and Unwin have a YouTube channel with a number of useful videos on the Anthology.

'The 60 poems in this collection appear in their original, or near original, form and are wide-ranging in their subject matter: animals, the countryside, the struggle of bush life, early transport, sport, growing old, being young and having fun with words! But whether they are humorous, serious or playful, they are simply a joy to read!

No matter if we grew up reciting these classic poems at school, quote from them on important occasions or are meeting them for the first time, there is no doubt that these classic poems embody what it is to be Australian.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

''I am the river, gently flowing, as I wind my way to the sea.' (Mary Duroux)

'Follow the river of poetry through country, town, the bush, the four seasons, night and day and explore the Australian landscape through the eyes of our best Australian poets.

'In this beautiful collection of poems for children, award-winning author and poet, Libby Hathorn, has brought together favourites such as those by A.B. 'Banjo' Paterson, Dorothea Mackellar and C.J. Dennis, as well as more contemporary poems by Steven Herrick, Eva Johnson, Les A. Murray and others.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
 

'Paul Kelly’s songs are steeped in poetry. And now he has gathered from around the world the poems he loves – poems that have inspired and challenged him over the years, a number of which he has set to music. This wide-ranging and deeply moving anthology combines the ancient and the modern, the hallowed and the profane, the famous and the little known, to speak to two of literature’s great themes that have proven so powerful in his music: love and death – plus everything in between.

'Here are poems by Yehuda Amichai, W.H. Auden, Tusiata Avia, Hera Lindsay Bird, William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Constantine Cavafy, Alison Croggon, Mahmoud Darwish, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Fenton, Thomas Hardy, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Seamus Heaney, Philip Hodgins, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Ono No Komachi, Maxine Kumin, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Norman MacCaig, Paula Meehan, Czeslaw Milosz, Les Murray, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Ovid, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Porter, Rumi, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Izumi Shikibu, Warsan Shire, Kenneth Slessor, Wislawa Szymborska, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Ko Un, Walt Whitman, Judith Wright, W.B. Yeats and many more.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.