Cirrus@Austlit

'Greg McLaren's most recent book, After Han Shan and other poems (2012), draws in part from his long and ongoing engagement with the Chinese poetic tradition, and plays out a re-imagination of Han Shan's poems in an Australian cultural landscape, the NSW Hunter Valley Coalfields that McLaren grew up in.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Puncher & Wattman).

'The Bread Horse is a selection of poems from The Blue Dressing Gown and Lucidity, featuring both dark and comic poems inspired by his travels in Romania and Norway.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Myron Lysenko’s ‘a ghost gum leans over’ is bigger than most haiku books being published today. The book is divided into sections or sequences, including his daughter’s battle with cancer spanning ten years;  a year where a relationship breaks down and splits a family in two; a section of light poems, another of heavy poems and one about Lysenko’s local area in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria. The sixth section consists of haiku written for special occasions.' (Publication summary)

'Foxline reconnoitres the relationship between the land and the creatures on it: Man (a farmer), and Fox. The relationship between the creatures themselves reveals their alien natures. Both claim the land for themselves but neither is autochthonous. They are opposed to each other but have an understanding and an alliance nevertheless because they both kill and have nowhere else.' (Publication summary)

'Letters in Language re-iterates what is possible in the prose poem and autography, and is intended to evoke cultural memory. The Tagalog (Filipino) mirroring the English translations are intended to provoke monolingual speakers to question, as it conveys Harold Legaspi’s identity, being bi-lingual, in a manner of speaking, to tell his story in a language he almost forgot through the migration process into Australia. By conveying meaning in two languages, his writing functions in the most concrete way, through exemplifying not abandoning the language that raised him in a land now foreign to him.'(Publication summary)

'This book speaks to the experience of immigration and a search for belonging. It explores the nature of language as performative of place and consciousness, and raises the question of gendered cultural othering: what is it like to navigate Russian identity as a woman in a western country? It examines the stereotype of a Russian bride, who is seen as both submissive and a threat.

'Far and Wild looks at archetypes through cultural and feminist lenses.'(Publication summary)

'local concerns itself with the local environment of the Glebe, an inner city suburb of Sydney and with other areas of the inner city. Some of the poems were written as part of 366 Poetry Project. It traces the author’s family history and connections to the inner city and also addresses issues of colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people in Sydney. The book contains 13 artworks by the author.' (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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'Text Messages from the Universe was inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist text which guides souls on their 49-day transmigration through the ‘Bardo’, or intermediate state, between dying and rebirth. It immerses readers in subjective states of consciousness they might experience when they die. It imagines what they can see and think and hear in a seamless but fragmentary flow of poetic images which turn time and space on their heads.

'Text Messages from the Universe, the book, designed by Dylan Jones, includes images taken from the film of the same title by The Physical TV Company, and a front cover painting created especially for the occasion by Australian painter Michelle Hiscock, who similarly created the cover for Richard James Allen’s earlier volume with Flying Islands: Fixing the Broken Nightingale.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Alive in Dubbo is a collection of localised free verse. The poems are honest reflections, observational and personal depictions of life within an often-overlooked Australian community, serving both as individual snapshots and suggested chronicles of a larger narrative. Raw and sometimes confronting, illuminating and accessible, Alive in Dubbo offers a unique perspective of Australian culture and of existence itself.' (Publication summary)

'This collection of thirty-eight poems is a book in three parts: Elsewhere; Everything is Evening; and Final Days. These are poems of an unrehearsed life, of paths taken and not taken, of lives not lived left behind, and the shadows they leave. Mostly, these poems were birthed by narrative, and deepened by the lyric, which, following Judith Beveridge in her essay ‘Lyric Poetry’, “seeks to communicate an experience to others” through “the wild and lovely agency of poems.” Smith’s hope is that these poems invite the reader in, and take them somewhere else, that they seek beyond what we see before us, toward what lies beneath. His hope, too, in Beveridge’s words, is for a “resonance and attunement” between reader and listener.' (Publication summary)

'fierce (adj, adv, verb, postmodern archetype, rite of passage, attitude, book title): an experimental miniature work of collage and poetry which bears witness to the lost difference between love and abuse, the impact of this loss as it permeates experiences of eco-despair, and the rites practised that reclaim the roar of empowerment.' (Publication summary)