Poetry Books

Born in dire poverty but writing poetry all his life, even when he ran a successful business, Xifeng Yedu is one of the Chinese oral poets who doesn't belong but must write his kind of oral poetry that mixes politics with sex and transcends them, with a...

A multiple-award winner, widely published at home and abroad, and translated into many languages, Xiao Xiao is known for her sharp take on China's human rights record with a poetry as piercingly penetrating as personal, with vignettes of life portrayed...

A long civilisation produces poets and entrepreneurs alike. But a long civilisation like China produces poet-entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-poets, or even entrepoetreneurs. That's a major difference between China and Australia. Zhang Chunhua is...

The motivation behind this anthology is to create a collection of poems and reflections which serve as a gift for people in hospital, and for their loved ones and staff who may be supporting them during the anxieties of illness. The anthology is also...

Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to find horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for elusive balance points between memory and lived terrain, between past and present lives, between grief and...

In Glass Flowers, Diane Fahey explores many kinds of space - the enclosed spaces of rooms, art galleries, hospital wards, prehistoric caves, the airy, flowing spaces of gardens, and the sky's infinite life. Her intense engagement with the...

'Martin Johnston wrote, 'If out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry, what / do we make of our quarrels with Canberra?' Save As works to see these things together: memoir, elegy, politics and a feeling for earth. Its poems are...

Sea Scale comprises thirty new poems and a generous selection from Brook Emery's previous five volumes. From and dug my fingers in the sand, his first book, to Have Been and Are, his most recent, reviewers have noted the fluency and tactility of his...

Hear the Art is the essential poetry-as-art collection, loaded with Richard Tipping's elegant, wry and telling concrete poems made as sculpture and as picture. He is fascinated by words found within words, and articulating their iterations.Tipping works...

The sonnet is a classic lyric form that has beguiled and perplexed poets for over seven hundred years. In this, her thirteenth collection, Jordie Albiston re-invents the sonnet structure, trading meter for syllabics, and employing fifteen lines in lieu...

The quality of Australian poetry has never been higher, nor the number of distinctive voices greater.A landmark publication, this collection presents the astonishing achievements of Australian poetry during the last quarter of a century. Over ten years...

Duncan Hose is from the softslang line of of the chansonnier, whose reference points range between Trefoil Island, Melbourne and Coney Island. He is the author of Rathaus and One Und Bacchus.

A House by the River journeys through the six years Diane Fahey lived with her mother, Patricia, as her carer, and ends at a point five years after her death. Both the challenges and radiant moments of the relationship of mother and daughter are given...

Rae Desmond Jones' poetry specialises in precisely observed social and political phenomena. People and their often anti-social impulses, as acted out in tension with their social context, give his poetry the power to unsettle and disturb, while...

Australian ravens is a book of mourning, celebration, family, misgiving, lies and caution. The three long poems in this book, 'Broken', 'Not being in Kyoto' and 'The Blue Gum', each extend the questioning of memory, place and the past that featured in...

Tender poems on the death of his wife, witty Philip Larkin apercus, meditations on the spiritual need of Australians for Europe, hard-eyed satire as a political fixer dismisses as out-of-date the instruments of torture in the Tower of London: John...

This New & Selected Poems is a substantial and long-awaited compilation from one of Australia's most accomplished poets, a retrospective spanning more than thirty years. The New Poems section, 'Towards the Equator', represents Alex Skovron's sixth...

George Dyugayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the course of a life spanning much of the twentieth century, the spirit of his late father visited him in dreams and gave him the seventeen verses of the The...

Palace of Culture is a dream diary, leading the reader into a personal and surreal engagement with the bewildering complexity of contemporary popular culture. Like her previous work Red Roses, Palace is a freewheeling work drawing the reader in to...

The Beautiful Anxiety continually breaks across boundaries of the intimate and the global in an invigorating and unsettling mix of materialist and speculative writing on the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the...

Xn might be the shortest poem possible between two letters, a mathematical metaphor for poetry, shorthand for a process that takes something specific and transforms it into something more intensely itself. Jenkins' second collection begins pre-big bang,...

This engaging collection charts a wild ride, from the language of the laboratory to the surprises of hetero-sex to the yearnings of the about-to-be-cannibalised. The writing is at times provocative and sensual, at others slyly meditative, but always...

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems...

Terra Bravura, began as short text messages sent to David Musgrave from the desert on the way to Broken Hill. He later described their poetic form thuis:'The poems are terrific. Vox clamantis in desierto. The lines are dense and staccato, with a kind of...

Using the Rorschach inkblots as metaphors, conjuring the wondrous and the monstrous in his poems, Toby Fitch brings a new vision and shape to Australian poetry. Old modes of expression, such as the mythic, the romantic, the symbolic and the surreal, are...

Bonny Cassidy's first book, Certain Fathoms, glimmers with precisely observed moments that make a strange place of the familiar. These poems speak not only to each other but to and of other writers: Eve Langley, John Berryman, JS Harry. Cassidy knits...

In Sly Mongoose the author deals with the vagaries of the Adelaide art-scene, the career of Cy Twombly, the Sydney of the 1920s, 40s and today. A quartet of poems treats a single locale and time-frame from the point of view of an 'ordinary punter', a...

The Wing Collection presents a broad overview of the distinctive contribution Diane Fahey has made to Australian poetry over the course of thirty years. It offers extensive selections from her work on birds and insects, on the worlds of myth and story,...

Ten nights. Ten haunted locations. One terrifying adventure across Australia.From a gaol cell to a lunatic asylum to a night in a haunted hearse, The Ghost Poetry Project is one poet's attempt to find a language of guts and daring. A unique exploration...

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...

Intensely observant, gravely acute, these poems are a true achievement. In Simon West we have a poet who knows how to weight a line, how to savour a phrase. But he also proffers the nimble wit of the title poem, and of "Faute de mieux". West is a...

Concrete Tuesday contains two new sequences including the stunning Grace , which won the Josephine Ulrick Prize in 2008 and tells the story, backwards, of a man who loses his soul. In addition to these there are several new poems, some on the familiar...

Mishearing is a companion volume to Musgrave's 2016 vers libre collection Anatomy of Voice. In it, he details the compositional method of these poems as 'mishearings' of poems via Microsoft Word 2003's in-built speech recognition function. The...

A still moment captured by a camera's shutter. The rapid fire of the mouse in a tight League of Legends match. The protracted sound of a door closing with finality.In the eighteenth edition of this creative anthology, twenty-six writers explore...

**2021 National Biography Award, highly commended****2020 NSW Premier's History Awards, shortlisted**A new edition of this acclaimed biography of an unsung literary talent.Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with...

The Moods of Ginger Mick is a collection of poems about Ginger Mick, the larrikin hero of Gallipoli. On its release it was described by the Bulletin as'finely patriotic' and 'uniquely Australian'. It articulates the Anzac legend through the verses about...

Doreen, the third C.J. Dennis publication using his "Sentimental Bloke" characters, was first published by in October 1917 by Angus and Robertson.The four tales in verse in Doreen describe the married life of "the Bloke", dramatising...

John Shaw Neilson (18721942) is Australia's great lyric poet and Collected Poems (1934), dedicated to Louise Dyer, bears his imprimatur. Encouraged by his editor, Robert Croll, Neilson was totally involved in its publication and promotion, selecting the...

Lyrical and narrative-driven, with playful and fantastical elements woven throughout, the poems in The Infant Vine reflect on how ordinary moments become charged with significance and strangeness when disaster strikes. Such moments make imaginary worlds...

They follow flight paths and habitats of birds, from the Victorian Mallee to the forests of South East Asia, to Japan and the South of France. 'Sometimes,' as the painter says, 'it's almost as if I am looking at the earth with a bird's eye view- the...

Harsh Hakea is John Kinsella's second volume of collected works dating from 2005 to 2014 capturing a career in media res. It includes poems from widely read volumes like Jam Tree Gully, which won the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and...

This is the first volume of a three-volume Collected Poems by John Kinsella that dates back to when he was seventeen, and moves on through forty-one-plus years of writing and memorising poetry. Collected in one place for the first time are poems that...

A startlingly frank take on modern femininity, Michele Seminara's Suburban Fantasy combines finely crafted narratives with lyrical artistry and sure-footed eloquence. This is raw, fiery, firebrand feminist writing that manages to artfully co-exist with...

At the Bottom of It, PainCallie tries to give the fish a good death,short and sharp, severing the brain stem.Pithing like the sound a cherry makeswhen you extract the pip. Some thingsare instinct like spitting outwhat cracks, hard, against your teeth,or...

In his first days as Prime Minister, John Curtin presented himself to the press as a self-styled intellectual who loved sport and relaxing, when he could, with a book, beach walk, game of cards or fossick in the garden. He also revealed that he enjoyed...

'This substantial collection holds the reader with its unique voice and finely crafted language. In each section, the poems build on and inform each other, while their major themes thread throughout with compassion and wry humour. Whether as flaneur or...