Literature Books

Storm and Honey is the new collection by prize-winning poet Judith Beveridge. It concentrates in a dramatic way both the raw emotional power and the sweetness which are the essential qualities of Beveridge's verse. Its centrepiece, 'Driftgrounds' is a...

These poems question notions of Australianness, delivering a montage of voices, both imagined and real.

Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry across a timeframe of 1 July...

Diane Fahey builds on an already rich body of poetry about birds with this fresh tribute to their exquisite intelligence, grace and splendour as they exist in the wild, and in our immediate sensory world. Vividly, she evokes the lives and contemporary...

'Alive, passionate and on the move - these poems range through worlds of wide reading, inner and outer journeying, through both the historic and the personal past and present, the fleshly and the vegetal. Always alert to "terrible Aphrodite" in their...

The Boy in the Baseball Cap explores a range of subjects, and explores gay and lesbian themes, in a post-Menglong style.

The Hard Word is the second collection from this respected and influential critic and teacher. The poems contain his trademark conversational tone combined with vivid wit and is the distillation of 12 years of poetry.

'John Carey possesses a wicked, intelligent sense of humour and a deft feel for the play of language. His poetry is a finely calibrated device for detecting and skewering absurdity, cant, hypocrisy, humbug, mendacity, and institutional cruelty...

Astroturfing for Spring is the second collection for this conceptually challenging poet. His language has been described as bright and alive, perhaps a case of William Blake meets Hello Kitty: there is a mash-up of voices which offers unsettling...

Exploring relations to place, ways we receive language as we move in the world, and anxieties of communication, hotel universo particularizes the rendered, the middling and ostensibly universal. Written in Newcastle's suburbs and published here its poems...

Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt is a Marxist-feminist epic poem - wait, no, it's historical - actually it's poems of the worker's body. It is none and all of these things. It is absurd or perhaps entirely sincere. Gomez's second book brings...

Four Oceans, Toby Davidson's second collection, confirms his reputation as one of the most expansive and radical voices in the emerging generation of Australian poets. The scale and scope of the works are deliberately ambitious, often testing the limits...

The Owl Inside presents an often haunted and feral, sometimes confessional and domesticated enquiry into what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. These poems are suffused with musings on the escape to outer space, secret communications between...

'Wattison's poems are always investigative, always humane. They are always willing to take risks. I know of no other Australian poet who writes quite like Meredith Wattison. She choreographs language in a way that is distinctive, deftly filtering moods...

This anthology realigns Australian poetry from a 21st century perspective, with a selection from a wide range of living poets as well as familiar voices from the past. There is an emphasis on social observation and personal experience of Australia's...

Man Chen is a post-romantic poet who is at his best when language is polished like a withered flower, knowing its demise, but continuing to forge on against the odds, wanting to shine in a declining darkness that feels like depression.

Todd Turner's second book, Thorn, is an expansive and intimate collection whose poems open out with a strong and developed voice to encompass a broad range of subject matter. There are odes and elegies, stunning evocations of birds and animals, a...

Na Ye's poetry shows her as a woman relaxed at her work, smoking while staring inwardly at the outside world, focusing on her own inner world, seeking peace and tranquility from night as much as from the storm or desert out there in her peripheral vision...

S. K. Kelen's oeuvre covers a diverse range of styles and subjects, and includes pastorals, satires, sonnets, odes, narratives, haiku, epics, idylls, horror stories, sci-fi, allegories, philosophical musings, prophecies, politics, history, love poems,...

Martin Duwell wrote in Australian Poetry Review that 'Sharkey's project seems to be built on a desire to make poetry once more (or more satisfactorily) deal with life as a socially lived phenomenon, and that 'not many people are writing so well and so...

A Crooked Stile takes a slantwise leap over the everyday, a fencer's delight in parry and parody. Starting out from an almost out-of-body consideration of being, Jenkins blithely waltzes around the globe, your better-than-Baedeker witty tour guide. At...

Shorter Lives' histories of notable creators (and notable enablers of the creative) drift away from conventional tellings to offer alternative facts and believable untruths. No small part of the author's extensive research, however, has been the trawling...

In these essays Simon West examines our metaphors for reachingback after inspiration. Rather than cultural rubble ripe for plunder, he celebrates our waterways in imagining that heritage, rivers that nourish the red gums across floodplains. In doing so...

A lickety split trip through Australianlife with slippery language, puns, sleight of lip and playful sharp-eyedobservation. From the sudden sharks waiting under the water in Sydney Harbourto rainbow lorikeets, and too too sleekly cheeky bower...

Like its precursor Barnacle Rock, Brief Garden is a collection of poems largely concerned with environmental degeneration and loss. The title poem deals with the ephemeral nature of a civilisation and its artefacts, but the focus of the collection goes...

Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem's jib, there the poise & rancour of another. For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some...

The Clambake is the annual culmination of a new poetry project in Newcastle, NSW - 'Cuplet Poetry Night'. Founded by Claire Albrecht in August 2018, the monthly event hosts poets from across Australia and the world.The poems in this anthology cover vast...

Numb and Number collects together poems written between 2011 and 2019. At its core is a confronting sequence of confessional poems which arises from depression and includes poems on the death of the poet's mother. It also includes a number of narrative...

These poems are unflinching in the face of death, yet suffused with the delights of living, from a potato harvest to a walk beside a river. They are in tune with the complexities of the modern world - the unseen environmental impact of war, an...

Material is drawn from his 3-year practice of creating hand-written artist books and is the first time it has been widely available to the public. Mannix's work centres on the documentation and investigation of his experiences of schizophrenia and, what...

In this powerful collection Ross Gillett covers a wide poetic landscape - traditional verse forms, carefully honed free verse, exploratory long sequences and a wealth of shorter poems. He covers an equally wide range of experience: family and childhood,...

Gravity as a physical influence, the weight of gravity, and gravity ofthought and action are central to Andrew Sant's new collection of poems - and sotoo is the means of baffling gravity, not the least by the deployment of wit.Gravity here is also...

perhaps I am willing to be with you every day raising ducks. my heart, for the rest of my life is a window pane cleaned till it shines...I Live Alone is part of a new bilingual Chinese poetry series. This collection of poems, in Chinese and English,...

This is an important and timely book from a mature, perspicacious voice. Phyllis Perlstone shows us a Monash behind the image on the $100 bank note: the engineer, innovator, man-about-town, husband, father, warrior, tactician; his love affairs and...

This very lively collection contains a wide sweep of poems, many of them prize-winning, taking readers on a remarkable journey. Some look to the past, others to the future, but all are of their time: the reverberating now. The tone is contemporary and...

Like many poets, MartinLangford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The neat snakescollected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way ofarticulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they neverthelessretain the...

Judith has an amazing voice and writes poems that make you feel something. That's why I love her poetry. - Vanessa Page in Facebook, 2015After reading Flares I popped it in my bag and carried it with me so I could open it at any time (and I have) and...

A small black cat wakes in the box in which itwas carried to a dump and makes its way home through the drains. The onlychange in the divine realm is that there is no longer anyone or anythingguarding the gates of the dead. - 'Downpayment on a...

This first full-length volume draws from poems written over roughly ten years: prose sequences, sonnets or thereabouts, parody-homages, a metro poem, psychical collaborations, and drawn from small-print chapbooks. Combining a condensed lyricism, collage,...

With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, Tight Bindings grapples with embodied experiences and moments of transition. Birth, death, sex, illness, desire, and motherhood are all brought into conversation with the stories we tell and the secrets we...

Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia's most polluted urban waterway, the 'Cooks River', to a...

Chester is the first Australian poet to write poetry in the jokey, colloquial style of what is known as the New York school - poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, who threw phrases at the page like an action painting, and treated...

Out of the Blocks is the debut full-length poetry collection from Newcastle based poet Ellen Shelley. Curiosity, memory and deep feeling can be found in these poems that play with the dark edges of the lyrical I and explore the complexity in particular...