Poetry Books

The poems in In the Photograph unfold in domestic and suburban settings. They capture the exact moment of writing: how, from it, possibilities branch out into observation, memory, word play, analogy, fantasy, other artworks and other art forms. Cinema,...

Powerful debut presenting a bold new female voice in Australian poetry.The poems in this collection draw upon the sounds, colours and quirks of urban and suburban Australia. Personal perceptions and associations are interwoven with snippets of speech,...

**Winner, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024, Mary and Peter Briggs Award for Poetry****Winner, Victorian Prize for Literature 2024****Winner, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2024, Poetry**When Ping leaves Hong Kong to live in the South Island of...

Intense, dramatic, theatrical - an important new poetry collection which draws its strength from its confrontation with grief and mourning.As its title suggests, the poems in Autumn Royal's The Drama Student explore theatrical responses to life. And in...

'Dougan's elliptical work hints at a life that hovers just beyond our comprehension; in dreams, tales, the past, in the imagination of the poet. This other world surrounds even the most domestic of the poems.' - Winner's citation, West...

The Judith Wright Calanthe Award is Australia's most prestigious poetry prize. Its award to Michael Farrell marks him out as one of our most important poets. There is no one like him for his souped-up surrealism, the range of his images, his wit and...

This selection collects some of the most influential and moving work of the poet Zheng Xiaoqiong, who spent nearly a decade at the beginning of the century working in the newly created factories and warehouses in what has become one of the largest...

False Nostalgia is rare among poetry collections, a work which is both lyrical and philosophical. It explores the way memory works, and the role memory plays in our sense of identity, and what we take to be the significant moments in our lives the...

'...an outstanding achievement that will, with its skill and elegance, deeply enrich Australian poetry and whoever reads it.' Judges' citation, 2013 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Poetry. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet, is at the...

"He seems tostart writing a poem and then becomes shocked, stunned, by a word he's just putdown, unable to go past it, as if discovering the letters for the first time,as if the poem has somehow written him." Kirsten Krauth, The AustralianJam...

Many poems in this collection explore the intrusions of 'the wild' into daily life,through memories, in illness, and in places that you've lost or left behind. Dougan isinterested in the ways in which the past re-enters the present, particularly through...

Devadatta's Poems complements the sequence 'Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree', published in Beveridge's earlier collection Wolf Notes, which followed the travels of Siddhattha Gotama before he became the Buddha, and...

JohnMateer's previous poetry book SouthernBarbarians traced the influence of the Portuguese empire in the IndianOcean it was shortlisted for the PM's Award for Poetry and the NSW andVictorian Premiers' Literary Awards. Unbelievers,or The Moor takes this...

New Works on Paper is remarkable for its surreal logic and imagery. Things as familiar as bread and pencils or as strangely menacing as Serena Williams' earring or Keira Knightly's jaw clash with the unrelenting forces of time, desire, and the natural...

EphemeralWaters is a book-length poem, told by an Australiantraveller, which follows the once-great Colorado River from its source in thecentral Rocky Mountains, through the American Southwest and the Sonoran Desertof Mexico, to its historical delta in...

In the 1990s, when music was recorded on cassettes and movies on VHS, Vanessa Berry was reacting to the loneliness of life in the suburbs by constructing imaginary worlds and identities from video hits, late-night music programs, band t-shirts, mixtapes...

By turns intimate and grand in scale, Gorton's new collection of poems features snow domes, storm glasses, museum display cases, an ancestral home and the air-locked rooms of a mythical space hotel: all images which contains worlds within worlds, rooms...

Goad Omen is Wakeling's first full-length collection of poems, a vibrant and witty interplay of depths and resurfacings, portraying a world littered with grim foreshadowings and kitschy memorabilia alike. Traversing fable and found object, hearsay and...

Alan Wearne is this country's most public poet, a master of the Australian idiom, the recorder of its fashions, and the scourge of its big-noters, pretenders and crooks. They are the targets of the central poem in this collection, 'The Vanity of...

Limited Cities is a collection which wrestles with the peculiarities of place, particularly the city and its outlying suburbs, with its vast housing estates and shopping malls and highways, 'where silent graffiti haunts the/ midday breeze where spring/...

Michael Brennan's third collection of poetry tunes into the feedback loops of consciousness in these fluid modern times. It develops the surrealism of his earlier poetry with an anarchic openness to experience underwritten by anxiety, dysfunction and the...

Here, There and Elsewhere, is Vivian Smith's first new collection in five years, and his most personal book. The poems draw on memories of life in Hobart and Sydney, travels in Europe and South America, old friends and respected writers, offering quiet...

These poems question notions of Australianness, delivering a montage of voices, both imagined and real.

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...

Diane Fahey builds on an already rich body of poetry about birds with this fresh tribute to their exquisite intelligence, grace and splendour as they exist in the wild, and in our immediate sensory world. Vividly, she evokes the lives and contemporary...

'Alive, passionate and on the move - these poems range through worlds of wide reading, inner and outer journeying, through both the historic and the personal past and present, the fleshly and the vegetal. Always alert to "terrible Aphrodite" in their...

The Boy in the Baseball Cap explores a range of subjects, and explores gay and lesbian themes, in a post-Menglong style.

The Hard Word is the second collection from this respected and influential critic and teacher. The poems contain his trademark conversational tone combined with vivid wit and is the distillation of 12 years of poetry.

'John Carey possesses a wicked, intelligent sense of humour and a deft feel for the play of language. His poetry is a finely calibrated device for detecting and skewering absurdity, cant, hypocrisy, humbug, mendacity, and institutional cruelty...

Astroturfing for Spring is the second collection for this conceptually challenging poet. His language has been described as bright and alive, perhaps a case of William Blake meets Hello Kitty: there is a mash-up of voices which offers unsettling...

Exploring relations to place, ways we receive language as we move in the world, and anxieties of communication, hotel universo particularizes the rendered, the middling and ostensibly universal. Written in Newcastle's suburbs and published here its poems...

Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt is a Marxist-feminist epic poem - wait, no, it's historical - actually it's poems of the worker's body. It is none and all of these things. It is absurd or perhaps entirely sincere. Gomez's second book brings...

Four Oceans, Toby Davidson's second collection, confirms his reputation as one of the most expansive and radical voices in the emerging generation of Australian poets. The scale and scope of the works are deliberately ambitious, often testing the limits...

The Owl Inside presents an often haunted and feral, sometimes confessional and domesticated enquiry into what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. These poems are suffused with musings on the escape to outer space, secret communications between...

'Wattison's poems are always investigative, always humane. They are always willing to take risks. I know of no other Australian poet who writes quite like Meredith Wattison. She choreographs language in a way that is distinctive, deftly filtering moods...

This anthology realigns Australian poetry from a 21st century perspective, with a selection from a wide range of living poets as well as familiar voices from the past. There is an emphasis on social observation and personal experience of Australia's...

Man Chen is a post-romantic poet who is at his best when language is polished like a withered flower, knowing its demise, but continuing to forge on against the odds, wanting to shine in a declining darkness that feels like depression.

Todd Turner's second book, Thorn, is an expansive and intimate collection whose poems open out with a strong and developed voice to encompass a broad range of subject matter. There are odes and elegies, stunning evocations of birds and animals, a...

Na Ye's poetry shows her as a woman relaxed at her work, smoking while staring inwardly at the outside world, focusing on her own inner world, seeking peace and tranquility from night as much as from the storm or desert out there in her peripheral vision...

S. K. Kelen's oeuvre covers a diverse range of styles and subjects, and includes pastorals, satires, sonnets, odes, narratives, haiku, epics, idylls, horror stories, sci-fi, allegories, philosophical musings, prophecies, politics, history, love poems,...

Martin Duwell wrote in Australian Poetry Review that 'Sharkey's project seems to be built on a desire to make poetry once more (or more satisfactorily) deal with life as a socially lived phenomenon, and that 'not many people are writing so well and so...

A Crooked Stile takes a slantwise leap over the everyday, a fencer's delight in parry and parody. Starting out from an almost out-of-body consideration of being, Jenkins blithely waltzes around the globe, your better-than-Baedeker witty tour guide. At...

Shorter Lives' histories of notable creators (and notable enablers of the creative) drift away from conventional tellings to offer alternative facts and believable untruths. No small part of the author's extensive research, however, has been the trawling...