One Hundred Great Books in Haiku (Popular Penguin) by David Bader

$12.99 AUD

Category: Poetry | Series: Popular Penguins Ser.

In the sixteenth century, Japanese monks developed the Haiku, a poem consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. Now, in The Loose Canon, David Bader applies this ancient poetic form to 100 Great Books. From Homer to Milton to Dostoyevsky, the entire literary canon is finally w ithin reach of even the shortest attention spans. The formal requirements of the haiku have, admittedly, necessitated a few cuts, such as characters, plot, dialogue and descriptive passages. Still, these are small sacrifices in view of the huge savings in time and shelf space. Avoid eyestrain and deforestation and show off your literary prowess at parties. It's the perfect gift for today's busy reader. ...Show more

Crow College - New and Selected Poems by Emma Lew

$26.95 AUD

Category: Poetry

The dark aura of Emma Lew's poetry has made her a compelling and mysterious presence for successive generations of Australian poets. Lew is highly regarded for the dramatic intensity of her poetry, which combines sudden shifts of voice and perspective with a heightened awareness of the moment. Her maste ry of the ominous setting and the resonant line, and her command of poetic form - particularly the interior monologue, the pantoum and the villanelle - draw on a deep correspondence between the figure of the defiant woman, volatile, dangerous, ironic, and the destructive forces of history. This selection brings together poems from her previous collections The Wild Reply, Anything the Landlord Touches and Luminous Alias, as well as twenty-four new poems not previously collected in book form. ...Show more

Kindred by Kirli Saunders

$24.99 AUD

Category: Poetry

This is the breaking, the shattering, the smattering of every limit ever accepted or imposed... Kindred, Kirli Saunders debut poetry collection, is a pleasure to lose yourself in. Kirli has a keen eye for observation, humour and big themes that surround Love/Connection/Loss in an engaging style, complem ented by evocative and poignant imagery. It talks to identity, culture, community and the role of Earth as healer. Kindred has the ability to grab hold of the personal in the universal and reflect this back to the reader. ...Show more

Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr

$24.95 AUD

Category: Poetry

Visceral and energetic, Omar Sakr’s poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a seething, urgent collection from a distinctive new voice. ‘The tyranny that we can inflict on each other, the harms of family and history, the need for solace and belonging find perfect pitch in line after line of this magnificent collection. There’s an urgent need for this book, it should be on every shelf.’ – Judith Beveridge ‘The Lost Arabs is the poetic posture of a man in all his forms standing by the eternal river, who has placed both feet in the sand, and who refuses to sink.’– Ali Cobby Eckermann ‘The new and powerful voice, public, performative, but also vulnerably intimate, of one of our “children of elsewhere”.’ – David Malouf ...Show more

An Open Book by David Malouf

$19.95 AUD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: 1 Poetry

This is only David Malouf's third new poetry volume in nearly 40 years, so it is a significant publishing event. As one of Australia's greatest living poets, Malouf continues to meditate and reflect on themes of mortality and memory. The poems in An Open Bookare attentive and evocative, vital and beauti ful, revisiting and reimagining some of the key themes that have resonated with readers over his impressive career. Like the 'small comfort of light . . . as night comes on', Malouf's new poems hold close the precious and tender. Only a few of these poems have ever been published, so most of the collection will be completely new to readers everywhere. An Open Bookwill be the literary gift of the Christmas and summer of 2018. ...Show more

Apparently by Joanne Burns

$19.95 AUD

Category: Poetry

The poems collected in apparently appear like visions, intensely experienced but barely real. Where does a poem come from? Over four sections this question is considered. The first section gathers poems spring-boarding from the clues and solutions to crossword puzzles; the second recounts unsettling dre ams in the form of prose poems or microfictions; 'dial', the longest section, acknowledges the bewildering sense of daily time and the dizzying spectacle of social and worldly matters contained within. Finally, from a more restful or relaxed vantage, 'the random couch' presents a number of drifting poems, written while the poet was lounging on the sofa. Joanne Burns is Australia's pre-eminent satirical poet, and her poems are remarkable for their verve and humour and word-play, and the way in which their linguistic resonances suddenly confound your expectations.Her most recent poetry collections published by Giramondo are amphoraand brush, which won the 2016 NSW Premier's Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. Her work has been taught in high schools, and produced for radio, television, performance and theatre ...Show more

Baffling Gravity by Andrew Sant

$25.00 AUD

Category: Poetry

Banjo Paterson's Poems of the Bush by Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

$24.99 AUD

Category: Poetry

The poetry selected for this collection reveals Paterson's love and appreciation for the Australian bush and its people. It contains not only widely published and quoted poems such as 'On Kiley's Run' and 'Clancy of The Overflow', but also lesser known poems such as 'The Uplift' and 'The Wind's Message' . The colour plates of works by Australian artists subtly illustrate the images evoked by the poems. ...Show more

Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria: A Novel in 34 Cantos by Brian Castro

$26.95 AUD

Category: Poetry

Blindness and Rage is a novel told in 34 cantos, somewhat in the manner of Pushkin's great Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Castro's hero Lucien Gracq is a townplanner from Adelaide who is writing a book-length poem, Paidia. Doubtful of its reception, he travels to Paris to join a literary club wh ich guarantees its members anonymity, by having their books published under someone else's name, while the authors themselves are encouraged to commit suicide if they are not already, as in Gracq's case, facing death from a terminal illness. Castro's novel is a part-serious, part-comic fantasy on the present fate of literary authors, who might as well be anonymous, or dead, for all the recognition that they are likely to receive for their writing. ...Show more

Collected Poems Les Murray by Les Murray

$59.99 AUD

Category: Poetry

Les Murray's new and updated Collected Poems displays the full range of his poetic art. This magnificent hardback volume contains all the poems he wants to preserve, apart from the verse novel Fredy Neptune, from his first book The Ilex Tree(1965) to Waiting for the Past(2015). In tracing Murray's artis tic development, it shows an ever-changing power, grace and humour, as well as great versatility and formal mastery. ...Show more

Green Shadows and Other Poems by Gerald Murnane

$24.00 AUD

Category: Poetry

Gerald Murnane turns to poetry at the end of his literary career, writing frank, disarming poems that traverse the rich span of his life. I esteem / above all poems or passages of prose / those that put a lump in my throat. - Gerald Murnane, 'The Darkling Thrush' Gerald Murnane, now in his eightieth yea r, began his writing career as a poet. After many years as a writer of fiction, he only returned to poetry a few years ago when he moved to Goroke, in the Western Districts of Victoria, after the death of his wife. The forty-five poems collected here are in a strikingly different mode to his fiction - without framing or digressions, and with very few images, they speak openly to the reader of the author's memories, beliefs and experiences. They are for this reason an important addition to his internationally recognised body of fiction, most recently Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction, published by Giramondo. The poems include tributes to his mother and father and to his family, and to places that have played a formative role in his life, like Gippsland, Bendigo, Warrnambool, the Western Districts, and of course Goroke. Especially moving are his poems dedicated to authors who have influenced him - Lesbia Harford and Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Henry Handel Richardson, Marcel Proust, and with particular force, the eighteenth-century poet John Clare, who gives the collection its title, revered 'not only for his writings / but for his losing his reason when / he was forced from the district he had wanted as his for life.' Praise for Gerald Murnane: 'A strong case could be made for Murnane...as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.' - New York Times 'No living Australian writer, not even Les Murray, has higher claims to permanence or a richer sense of distinction.' - Sydney Morning Herald ...Show more

I Love Poetry by Michael Farrell

$24.00 AUD

Category: Poetry

In I Love Poetry Michael Farrell continues to affirm poetry as a mode of thinking. His poems aspire to both memorability and meaning, and to invoke new Australian realities - 'the rhyme's a moral that becomes a fence; a fallen-down fence is a joy forever.' The tone is playful and ironic, more under the skin of the mind than in its face. Poems like 'Into a Bar', in which Blue Poles and INXS entertain themselves with digital prune juice and a video burger, or 'Cate Blanchett and the Dif cult Poem', with the actor and Waleed Aly, add new dimensions to Australian icons. 'Great Poet Snowdome' is a story of kitsch involving Sydney and a pope - a recurring gure in the book, since he reappears as Pope Pinocchio, alongside the Professor of Milk and Sugar. There's a Mad Max riff ('Put Your Helmet On'); a One Direction revision ('Drag Me Down'); and new appreciations of lyrebirds, kangaroos and chocolate frogs. There is Sid Vicious and there are lamingtons. There is everything that loves poetry: Weetbix, Iron Maiden T-shirts, motorbikes, and you. ...Show more