Poetry

'The Weave is the second book collaboration between Thurston Moore and John Kinsella – 'dubbed a work in progress by the two poets, the book guides readers through a world in decay, crafting an invigo rating language of spontaneity and survival out of the destruction. Moore and Kinsella aren't just observing – they implicate us all in the harms of global capitalism and environmental disaster, charting a back and forth between the individual and the crowd.' — Rosie Long Decter

'These poems start in Dolphy's key + end with a quarryman's dream. In between secrets are stored. See how many you can find.' — Clark Coolidge

Imprint: MAGABALA
RRP: $19.99

"Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing," wrote Stanley Kunitz many years ago; and recently, Rita Dove described her last volume, The Leaf and the Cloud, as "a brilliant meditation." For the many admirers of Mary Oliver's dazzling poetry and luminous vision, as well as for those who may be coming to her work for the first time, What Do We Know will be a revelation. These forty poems-of observing, of searching, of pausing, of astonishment, of giving thanks-embrace in every sense the natural world, its unrepeatable moments and its ceaseless cycles. Mary Oliver evokes unforgettable images-from one hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day to bees that have memorized every stalk and leaf in a field-even as she reminds us, after Emerson, that "the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.

Imprint: DACAPO
RRP: $24.99

This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 70s to the 1990s. This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 70s to the 1990s.

Imprint: ECCO
RRP: $32.99

Where Only the Sky had Hung Before disassembles and reassembles language found in the textual wastelands of the internet and the literary canon. Across many spectrums, from slippery lists of factoids to indices of figurative language, from a pantoum of #staywoke tweets to deep cuts and collage treatments of The Waste Land, The Argonauts, and The Left Hand of Darkness, these poems mobilise tensions and continuities between form and fluidity, gender and genre, literature and spam, childhood and adulthood, the virtual and the real.

Imprint: VAGABOND PRESS
RRP: $25.00

Ken Bolton’s A Whistled Bit of Bop begins and ends with poems that embrace the abstract through collage — working with pre-existing materials, the initial selection often arbitrary. ‘Double Trouble’ deals with time and timing, art, friendship; closing the collection, ‘Triumvirate’ works with similar elements but in a context that is political and historical. Bolton acknowledges parts of a particular pantheon (F.T. Prince, Tony Towle, Peter Schjeldahl, Ashbery, Berrigan, John Forbes) in the sequence ‘Late Night Reading’, which tips from satire to elegy and out again, while ‘Some Photos for Gabe’ takes the form of a letter, wondering at the recipient’s life in London and meditating on two images of domestic life in Australia. In a different register, ‘Australian Suburban Garden’ is spun out of the ‘everyday’ — art, time, Europe. Some poems are amusing tours de force, others are like spells. “The light changed? Must have.”

Imprint: VAGABOND PRESS
RRP: $25.00

The title of this poetry narrative - 'A Wild Kind of Tune' - captures perfectly the imaginative journey into the poignant psycho-geography of Miriel Lenore's maternal great-grandmother, Caroline. In a wild tale arcing from 1845 to the present, in poetry underpinned by meticulous research, we inhabit settler society with all its attendant joys, hardship and grief as we careen with Caroline through her journey of love, loss and horror into madness. The use of the actual medical records from late nineteenth century Asylums for the Insane (Gladesville and Kenmore) is chilling in the extreme; the rendering of these facts into a narrative of sensitive family history a partial redemption, a heartfelt honouring, of Caroline's bitter life.

Imprint: WAKEFIELD
RRP: $19.99

Praise for Wildlife of Berlin

Neilsen’s intelligent, searching, and relentlessly contemporary poems in Wildlife of Berlin reveal a poet whose chief interest is transforming and challenging the way we see our human position in a world under ecological and ideological threat. At once philosophical and conversational, deadly serious and unerringly wry, these poems offer us forensically clear-eyed perspectives on subjects ranging from environmental degradation and the impending collapse of fragile ecosystems in the anthropocene, to unconventional and irreverent portraits of figures drawn from literature and politics and beyond. Neilsen’s poems are miraculously both deeply ethical and deeply comic; they surprise and delight with the irreverence of their critiques, while always keeping an eye on the tragic consequences of human folly. Above all, they ask us to sit still, to pay attention, to re-examine our basic precepts with equal measures of reason, wit, imagination and empathy. Wildlife of Berlin is a superbly crafted, incisive and urgent collection of new work from one of Australia’s most original poets, and deserving of the wide audience I am sure it will find. These are necessary poems for incendiary times.

SARAH HOLLAND-BATT


Imprint: University of WA Publishing
RRP: $22.99

Amanda Lovelace returns in the witch doesn't burn in this one — the bold second book in her "women are some kind of magic" series.

The witch: supernaturally powerful, inscrutably independent, and now – indestructible. These moving, relatable poems encourage resilience and embolden women to take control of their own stories. Enemies try to judge, oppress, and marginalise her, but the witch doesn't burn in this one.

Imprint: Andrews McMeel Publishing
RRP: $24.99

These remarkable poems are despatches from the edges of experience: from the remote coast of northern Iceland where tree-trunks and dead whales lie beached, to the furthest outposts of the Roman empire in the title poem – ‘From the very limit of the world,/Flavius sends you greetings, my lord.’ The collection is concerned with borders and brinks – the liminal spaces where distinctions blur between outer and inner, known and unknown, between what is familiar and what is other. This is the terrain of the displaced and deracinated but also the shimmering space where all is volatile, mutable, in flux – and it is also, of course, the thin, transparent veil between waking and sleep, between life and death.

Shadowed by mortality, lit by lyrical grace, Words from the Wall includes poems about the killing fields of Agincourt, Flanders, Vietnam and a memorial poem to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan attack where the dead are ‘stations of flame’, and it begins and ends at the boundaries of the Roman territory, at the edge of life: ‘The girls I laughed with once/in the baths’ atrium/are withered and wattle-necked./I love them still…’

Imprint: Jonathan Cape Publishers
RRP: $24.99

A new verse translation of one of the foundational ancient Greek works by the award-winning poet Alicia Stallings.

The ancient Greeks revered Hesiod, believing he had beaten Homer in a singing contest and that after his dead body was thrown to sea, it was brought back by dolphins. His Works and Days is one of the most important early works of Greek poetry. Ostensibly written by the poet to chide his lazy brother, it recounts the story of Pandora's box and humanity's decline since the Golden Age, and can be read as a celebration of rural life and a hymn to work.

Imprint: Penguin Black Classic
RRP: $14.99