Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Australian & Oceanian

Miranda Lello's debut collection of poetry is a deeply felt and often playful reflection on the liminal moments of contemporary life.  Influenced by poets such as Walt Whitman, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Sylvia Plath, Lello's keen eye searches out the possibilities of new worlds as they exist in the everyday moments of work,  of journeys, of love, and of  living.   This is a collection written on the body and mind and invested in the possibility of poetry to make us feel.

Jen Webb's new collection is a series of striking prose poems that explore the ways in which personal crises and memories might be re-examined through the elusive concept of the archive. How, she asks, might we construct a personal archive to 'make sense of the past in the work of facing and building the future'? Each of these finely wrought poems is a record of life lived through significant moments.

Set in the heart of Australia, Penny Drysdale's debut collection  breaks open the prison of self to lay bare the many contradictions in contemporary Australian relationships.  Love, injustice and ‘unbelonging’ weave their way through this torrid landscape like ancient creatures on a grand scale.  A credit card, a mouse trap, a discarded car battery, a pile of children’s clothing all become an opportunity to examine in harsh Australian light aspects of ourselves we usually confine to the dark. 

From the opening poem of Maggie Shapley's first collection Proof, we know we are in the company of a thoughtful, sometimes restless, poet. Here, in explorations of childhood and family, memory and loss, belonging and dislocation, we find every word conveying a powerful sense of lived encounters and experience. This is poetry characterised by close observation, restrained wit and a fine precision of language

Sometimes a poet's voice seems to land with a satisfying thump, fully formed. Charlotte Guest's is one such voice. Her elegant, tender and surprising lyrics are tuned, in her words, to 'invisible forces'. Her learning, worn light, makes the suburban world strange and familiar all at once. Investigating in her debut Soap 'the lodgings at the end of girlhood' with both wit and heart-aching ambivalence, Guest is one to watch.

Lucy Dougan

These are clear-eyed poems, both tough and tender. Guest casts dappled light across the everyday.

Emily Stewart

...