Australian Poetry
Keeper of the Ritual by Shey Marque ($23, PB) Shey Marque’s debut full collection is wonderfully responsive to the complexity & sensuality of ocean, bush, animals, art & human relationships. The poems are always wryly intelligent, self-aware & carefully crafted, across an impressive variety of forms. She brings to this rich collection the forensic eye, curiosity & insight of both the scientist and the artist, revealing how much they have in common. A William Maidment Garland by John Watson ($25, PB)
This is a collection of poems and prose pieces which celebrate and memorialize the life of Bill Maidment (1924– 2005), a former teacher in the English Department at the USyd who influenced a couple of generations of writers, thinkers & intellectuals. There’s a birthday poem, a Golden Wedding, a celebratory lament, two discursions designed to beguile the fever room, and a chapter by chapter synopsis (with limericks) of Thomas Love Peacock’s late, late, last & most lyrical novel. In each instance the presence of Bill Maidment as mentor is orchestrated in Watson’s allusive manner—’from beautifully poised meditations in the manner of Wallace Stevens through to light-hearted satire.’
Windfall by Greg McLaren ($25, PB)
In his 6th book, Greg McLaren finds his stories in those of others, and others’ in his. These poems seek, suspect & deepen connection; they nod, wink & pay, in nearly equal parts, homage & fromage. Windfall includes responses & asides to, and satires of, contemporary writers, & also sees McLaren further exploring his interest in classical Chinese poetry. He takes these poets for a drive through new contexts, reimagining their poems, eking out connection across culture, history, experience & space into a voice that is shared & his own.
Neat Snakes by Martin Langford ($25, PB)
Like many poets, Martin Langford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The ‘neat snakes’ collected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way of articulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they nevertheless retain the poem’s elegance, and its characteristic tension between emotion and idea.
Autobiochemistry by Tricia Dearborn ($23, PB)
‘Dearborn’s trademark finely balanced, masterfully honed poems are vitally engaged with the world, and with our cycles of love & loss within it. Fans of hers will be delighted to find here the full-length versions of both her 22-poem sequence for the elements, Autobiochemistry, and the shorter but no less fabulous sequence on perimenopause, The change: some notes from the field. Dearborn understands that even a bald fact (scientific, medical, biographical), held & tilted just so in the right light, can sing with the resonance of dream. There are also nightmares, as she deals deftly & devastatingly with childhood sexual trauma & the never-ending work of healing. A crucial & timely book.’—Melinda Smith
A little book of unspoken history by Elif Sezen ($25, PB)
Australian-Turkish poet & visual artist, Elif Sezen navigates physical & metaphysical spheres, conjuring multilayered historical & imaginative narratives. Memories of domestic disruption act as a point of departure in these poems, as she charts an ethereal personal odyssey—travelling through time, greeting souls in existential landscapes, illuminating extremity in inner and outer worlds, pivoting between vulnerability and strength, the sayable and the unsayable.
The short story of you and I Richard J Allen
From long narrative lines to fine-boned, lyrical loops & ties that bind these poems into place, Richard James Allen has taken risks with language that mark this as his most adventurous and significant book to date—his subject is being itself, and the way our biological and mental dimensions interact, with human intelligence and love being the unifying forces for this interaction. ($23, PB)
Towards Light & Other Poems by Sarah Day ($25, PB)
Light, as a physical and metaphorical entity recurs in many of the poems in this new collection by Sarah Day. Light makes its presence felt in these poems as a source of illumination and grace, it is also the means by which the flaws and discrepancies of the present and past are highlighted: ‘Sarah Day is a poet of wonderful attentiveness. She notices everything, persuading us, as readers, that she has seen and heard the living 2 world truly.’— Christopher Wallace-Crabbe.
Zebra & Other Stories by Debra Adelaide ($30, PB)
A body buried in a suburban backyard. A suicide pack worthy of Chekhov. A love affair born in a bookshop. The last days of Bennelong. And a very strange gift for a most unusual Prime Minister... Tantalising, poignant, wry, and just a little fantastical, this subversive collection of short fiction—and one singular novella—from bestselling author Debra Adelaide reminds us what twists of fate may be lurking just beneath the surface of the everyday.
The Rosie Result by Graeme Simsion ($30, PB)
Don & Rosie Tillman are back in Melbourne after a decade in The Big Apple, and they’re about to face their most important project. Their son, Hudson, is having trouble at school—his teachers say he isn’t fitting in with the other kids. Meanwhile, Rosie is battling Judas at work, and Don is in hot water after the Genetics Lecture Outrage. The life-contentment graph, recently at its highest point, is curving downwards. For Don Tillman, geneticist and World’s Best Problem-Solver, learning to be a good parent as well as a good partner will require the help of friends old and new. It will mean letting Hudson make his way in the world, and grappling with awkward truths about his own identity. And opening a cocktail bar. Hilarious and thought-provoking, with a brilliant cast of characters and an ending that will have you cheering for joy.
A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane ($40, HB)
Lost to the world for more than & decades, this is the essential link between two of Gerald Murnane’s masterpieces—the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. A Season on Earth is Murnane’s 2nd novel as it was intended to be—the first two sections were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 & the last 2 sections have never been in print. A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction, because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book & Adrian Sherd only half a character’. Here, at last, is 16 year-old Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars & idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature & landscapes—a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.
The Last Days Of The Romanov Dancers by Kerri Turner ($30, PB)
Petrograd, 1914. Valentina Yershova’s position in the Romanovs’ Imperial Russian Ballet is the only thing that keeps her from the clutches of poverty—clawing her way through the ranks, relying not only on her talent but her alliances with influential men. Then Luka Zhirkov—the gifted son of a factory worker—joins the company, and suddenly everything she has built is put at risk .For Luka, being accepted into the company fulfils a lifelong dream. But in the eyes of his proletariat father, it makes him a traitor. As civil war tightens its grip & the country starves, and the Imperial Russian Ballet becomes the ultimate symbol of Romanov indulgence—and Luka & Valentina are forced to choose: their country, their art or each other. A powerful debut novel of passion & revolution.
Driving into the Sun by Marcella Polain ($30, PB)
For Orla, living in the suburbs in 1968 on the cusp of adolescence, her father is a great shining light, whose warm & powerful presence fills her world. But after his sudden death, Orla, her mother & her sister are left in a no-man’s land—a place where the certainties & protections of the nuclear family suddenly & mysteriously no longer apply, and where the path between girl & woman must be navigated alone. Marcia Polain’s first novel, The Edge of the World, was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
The Heart of the Grass Tree by Molly Murn
When Pearl’s grandmother Nell dies unexpectedly, Pearl & her mother Diana & sister Lucy return to Kangaroo Island to mourn & farewell her. Each woman must reckon with Nell’s passing in her own way—but Nell had secrets, too, and as Pearl, Diana & Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind—her stories, poems, paintings— and unearths a connection to the island’s early history, of the early European sealers & their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people. Pearl’s deepening connection to their history, the island’s history, grounds her & brings the women back to each other. ($33, PB)
Year of the Beast by Steven Carroll ($30, PB)
Melbourne, 1917: the times are tumultuous, the city is in the grip of a kind of madness. The Great War is raging, and it is the time of the hotly contested 2nd conscription referendum. Fights are raging on the streets, rallies for ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ facing off against each other on opposing corners. Men, women & children, jostling, brawling, fighting & spitting. Through these streets walks Maryanne, 40 years old, unmarried & 7 months pregnant. These are uncertain, dangerous times for a woman in her position. And she is facing a difficult choice—a choice which gets more urgent by the day—whether to give her child up for adoption as the Church insists she does, or to keep her child & face an uncertain future. Steven Carroll brings his sweeping Glenroy series to a magnificent close.
