Cirrus@Austlit

'These poems are traces and markings through continuous topographies – streets, shores, bodies. They offer an experience of language underway, of jumping into the midst. Their shifts and discontinuities open up spaces through the immediate, memory, the personal, the difficulties of being situated or identified. Many of them are shards, borrowings and reshapings of forms, overheard dialogue and writings and art by others, signs and relics of the concrete world, tensions in a moment, the overturning of the ordinary like a leaf, and the resistance of playing at edges.

'Jones uses the soundtracks of modern lives – weather and television, music and journeys – as she negotiates difficult harbours and debatable terrains with perhaps more tenderness than previously in these times which seem broken and open. The poems are also voicings of a self under pressure, or close to breaking into the open, imagined, uncertain. They juggle a distrust of too many explanations and a wanting to know, to investigate through word magic and formal strategies.

'More than ever, locations and displacements interest this poet, the incompleteness of all journeys, gaps and mistakes, where gaps are not empty, where absence is presence. The moves in the book work at times against Jones’ usual reception as an urban poet with a broader mapping than before. Some of the writing is sparser and more open, the meditative lyricism is tempered with a humorous scepticism and argument, the poems more intuitive. Longer sequences and serial poems blend the topical and musical with a subtlety of feeling, an ear for taut lineation strung together on a thread of three or four presiding images. ‘The pages colour with the various, speaking skin of it, life.’'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

A major work of lyrical complexity and ethical vision, a turning point for a maturing and daring imagination. The poems are alert, assured and readable, concentrating with sensual, empathic intelligence on extraordinarily everyday happenings. Australian poet. (Source: TROVE)

'Of the Murri people, and born at the Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in Queensland in 1958, Lionel Fogarty is a leading spokesman for Indigenous rights in Australia through a poetry of linguistic uniqueness and overwhelming passion. In resisting the colonising force of English, he has reterritorialised the language of the invaders and made of it a language that speaks for his people. John Kinsella argues that Fogarty is the greatest living 'Australian' poet, forging a poetics that captures the orality of his people's millennia of song cycles and spirituality, and also engaging with codes and tools of international modernism. Fogarty is at once verbally affronting and celebratory of his identity. A deeply 'political' poet, he is also a singer whose poetry seeks healing and redemption for the many wrongs done to his people. There is a rage in the work, and the murder of his brother Daniel Yock by police in 1993 (in a police van), as well as of his people in general, compels his poetic spirit.

'In a significant interview Philip Mead conducted with him in 1994, Fogarty said: '...Daniel was a Song Man and he used to make songs up from his own dreaming, and he knew a lot of different languages. He was a really special person to my children. A very culturally talented guy, very dedicated to his culture.' And it's that dedication to his culture that Lionel Fogarty carries into a poetry that is cyclical and declarative, deeply metaphoric and metonymic at once. The 'timelessness', the dreaming, the conversations between story and land, between the totemic and people, are beyond labelling. A unique poet, he has effectively managed to confront the persistent attacks by imperialist language, and (still) colonial culture/s, on his people's voice, by preserving its identity, and also creating something entirely new (an extension of what existed before), to fight the invader. A liberator, an innovator, and a writer with a purpose as crucial as the existence of his people. As Kinsella has said: 'Fogarty has de-hybridised his own language by hybridsing English with his people's language. It's a poetry that demands respect. In the poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first century, he is as essential and skilled as any. All of us should listen.' (Publication summary)

'Alison Croggon's bold new collection, Theatre, uses a range of narratives, fables, monologues and compressed lyrics to examine female identity and the idea of divine experience. Stepping confidently between different registers and a wide range of forms, Croggon's poetry shows a writer at the height of her powers narrating a female world of folk tales, trials, challenges, transgressions, and mythologies, where rites of passage are both linguistic, spiritual and political, and where persona is stripped back to an essential humility always journeying into fragile and impossibly beautiful worlds.' (Publisher's blurb)