Best of Australian Poems 2021


Book Description

This is the first of a new series, offering a poetic snapshot of the year that was, 1 July 2020-30 June 2021--featuring 100 poets and 100 poems across an astonishing range of poetic voice, approaches and themes.




Best of Australian Poems 2022


Book Description

Best of Australian Poetry is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry, across a timeframe of 1 July 2021 - 7 August 2022, the series, now in its second year, will explore how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year. The book opens with an introduction by its 2022 editors, award-winning and highly respected poets and editors, Jeanine Leanne and Judith Beveridge. Both Jeanine, a Wiradjuri poet, and Judith have extensive experience as poetry teachers, academics and poetry anthologists previously.The Best of Australian Poetry (BoAP) series is published by Australia's national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry, and will feature two different guest editors each year, to amplify the range of voices selected. It is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and individual patrons.




Best of Australian Poems 2023


Book Description

Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was.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 2022 - 1 August 2023, the series, now in its third year, will explore how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year. The 2023 book opens with an introduction by its editors, highly respected poets and editors Gig Ryan and Panda Wong. Gig is one of the country's most highly recognised and read poets, with major awards for her poetry over decades, and with a prominent publication profile both here and overseas. Panda, alongside being an emerging poet and editor, is a performer who also works in digital/virtual spaces. Previous editors of this prestigious series have been Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch (2021) and Jeanine Leane and Judith Beveridge (2022).The Best of Australian Poems (BoAP) series is published by Australia's national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry, and will feature two different guest editors each year, to amplify the range of voices selected. It is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and individual patrons.




New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry


Book Description

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.




Heat and Light


Book Description

In this award-winning work of fiction, Ellen van Neerven leads readers on a journey that is mythical, mystical and still achingly real. Over three parts, van Neerven takes traditional storytelling and gives it a unique, contemporary twist. In 'Heat', we meet several generations of the Kresinger family and the legacy left by the mysterious Pearl. In 'Water', a futuristic world is imagined and the fate of a people threatened. In 'Light', familial ties are challenged and characters are caught between a desire for freedom and a sense of belonging. Heat and Light is an intriguing collection that heralded the arrival of a major new talent in Australian writing.




Sydney Spleen


Book Description

Sydney Spleen takes Charles Baudelaire's concept of spleen as melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything - and combines it with a contemporary sense of irony so as to articulate the causes of our doom and gloom: corporate rapacity, climate change, disaster capitalism, the plague, neo-colonialism, fake news, fascism, and how to raise kids in a world fast becoming obsolete. The backdrop of this collection of poems is sparkling Sydney and its screens, through which the poet mainlines global angst. Fitch's 'spleen poems', with their radical use of form and tone, are as much an aesthetic experience as a literary one - translation becomes homage becomes satire becomes song; essays become lyrics become rants become dreams. What is a poem when 'no one believes in the future now anyway'? Nor is the collection lacking in humour. Sydney Spleen mocks everything in its crystal glass, yet still finds real moments of connection to celebrate. 'Fitch's poems are not interested in slowly unfolding a metaphor or arriving at a singular meaning. Instead, they ask you to cling on for your life.' -- Sarah Holland-Batt




Human Looking


Book Description

The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to 'correct'. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. 'I, this wonderful catastrophe', the poet has Mary Shelley's monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive - or 'deformed' - poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.




The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry


Book Description

'A very fine anthology, with exemplary introductions. It is refreshing to see how much has been done so well.' - Peter Pierce Wide in scope and bold in ambition, this exciting anthology covers the range of Australian poetic achievement, from early colonial verse through to contemporary work, with a strong recognition of Indigenous voices. This collection brings together great and familiar names with those that deserve better recognition. Including valuable introductory essays by John Kinsella, and biographical notes for all the poets, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry presents the full measure of Australian poetic talent in all its richness and diversity.




Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women's Talk


Book Description

"Arrernte women are constantly stretched across two incongruent worlds. The world of Arrernte language, culture, kinship, country and knowledge systems which they are striving to protect and maintain on a daily basis. The modern world with its ongoing colonisation and relentless pressures. Both of these worlds are captured in the poems" - Penny Drysdale




60 Classic Australian Poems


Book Description

This is a superb introduction to poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. With insight and insider knowledge, poet Geoff Page emphasises the contribution made by the notable generation of Australian poets who emerged during and just after World War II. It includes several contemporary poems which are likely to become classics in the near future. Each poem is followed by a short, lively essay discussing its merits and suggesting why it might be considered a classic.