Poetry

I’m not Racist, But …

by Anita Heiss
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genre Essays · Literary Fiction · Poetry

An award-winning collection of poetry and prose from acclaimed Indigenous writer and advocate Anita Heiss. By turns witty, angry, eloquent, moving and insightful, I’m Not Racist But… includes Advance Australia Unfair, Pieces for Children, My 10 Point Plan for a Better Australia, Who’s Truth, I Don’t Hate You, But… , Treaty, The A-Z of First Contact, Being Aboriginal and Proud to be A Koori.

‘Anita Heiss writes from the heart … her poems are an angry and eloquent call for justice for Indigenous Australian people.’ Rosie Scott

First published in 2007, the collection won the Scanlon Prize for Poetry in the same year.

Anita Heiss, a member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales, is one of Australia’s best known Indigenous authors and advocates, and has won and been shortlisted for multiple awards. Professor of Communication at the University of Queensland, a board member of the State Library of Queensland and Lifetime Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, she’s written poetry, novels, short stories, children’s books and, in 2004, a memoir, Am I Black Enough for You? She co-edited The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature with Peter Minter. Her most recent book is the historical novel, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021). Visit her website at https://www.anitaheiss.com.

The Three Fates and Other Poems

by Rosemary Dobson
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genre Poetry

Rosemary Dobson received the Patrick White Award in 1994, with the selection committee declaring that her poetry ‘abounds in penetrating observation and quiet wisdom; it is blessedly free from sensational effects — one reason, perhaps, why her work has not attracted the attention it deserves.’

Yet it had been noticed. First published in 1984, this collection, The Three Fates and Other Poems, won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize and was joint winner of the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry.

Rosemary Dobson ( 1920–2012) was an award-winning poet whose works include Cock Crow (1965), winner of the Sidney Myer Award for Australian Poetry, and Untold Lives and Later Poems (2000), winner of the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize. As well as being the recipient of the Patrick White award in 1994, she received a New South Wales Premier’s Special Award in 2006.

The Strength of Us As Women

by Kerry Reed-Gilbert
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genre Anthology · Essays · Poetry

A ground-breaking collection of poetry and prose from some of Australia’s best known Indigenous women writers. Compiled by Kerry Reed-Gilbert and first published in 2000.

‘If you want to know the reality of inside Black Australia, this book is for you. The women who speak within these pages allow you, the reader, to look into their hearts, minds, bodies and souls. Share with them their journey, the journey of life.’ — Kerry Reed-Gilbert, editor.

The Strength of Us As Women includes work from Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Yasmin Johnson, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Rosemary Plummer, Barbara Nicholson, Lorraine McGee-Sippel, Anita Heiss, Nellie Green, Christine Simpson, Kathy Malera-Bandjalan, Melanie Williams, Lisa Bellear, Rosemary van den Berg, Rebecca McNaboe, Noeline Briggs-Smith, Kostane Strong, Dorothy Williams, Judy Kirby and Vicki-Ann M. Speechley-Golden.

The Observatory

by Dimitris Tsaloumas
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genre Poetry

An award-winning poetry collection from Dimitris Tsaloumas presented in the original Greek as well as with English translations by Philip Grundy.

In a review titled ‘Master of Imagery’, Susan McKernan writes: ‘Dimitris Tsaloumas is a poet who has lived in Australia for 30 years. He has had several books of poetry published but because he writes in Greek his work is relatively unknown in Australia.’ She concludes: ‘Grundy has done English readers a great service in translating these poems. Australian contemporary literature is not so rich that we can afford to ignore writers working in other languages.’ — The Canberra Times, 1983

McKernan’s observation about The Observatory remains true today when Australian publishing still largely resists translating works, yet our society is more culturally diverse than ever.

First published in 1983, The Observatory won the National Book Council Award for Australian Literature the same year.

Dimitris Tsaloumas (1921–2016) was a Greek-Australian poet. His works include Falcon Drinking (1988), The Harbour (1998), winner of the John Bray Award for Poetry, The Barge (1993), winner of the Lesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry, and most recently, A Winter Journey (2014). In 2004 he was the recipient of the Patrick White Award.

The Hanging of Jean Lee

by Jordie Albiston
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genre Crime · Poetry

In 1951, Jean Lee was Australia’s last woman hanged. Award-winning poet Jordie Albiston’s acclaimed verse novel puts this woman’s tragic story within the context of her times.

‘As one might expect, it is a grim, tough story of the deterioration of a young woman’s life and its brutal end. It is divided into four sections with deliberately cold-hearted titles: Personal Pages, Entertainment Section, Crime Supplement and Death Notices. The Hanging of Jean Lee is economically and imaginatively conceived with a strong narrative drive. In a series of short connected poems, Jordie Albiston has made a heart-breaker out of her material, ringing the verse changes, using rhyme and blank verse in short chopped lines, colloquial language, reportage, and newspaper headlines with considerable skill.’ — Dorothy Hewett, Australian Book Review, 1999.

First published in 1998, The Hanging of Jean Lee was adapted for music-theatre and performed at the Sydney Opera House by a group of singers and musicians brought together for the purpose.

Jordie Albiston has published six collections of poetry. Nervous Arcs (1995), her debut, won the Mary Gilmore Award and The Sonnet According to M (2009) won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her most recent work is Fifteeners(2021). She received the Patrick White award in 2019.

St. Clair

by John Scott
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genre Poetry

Award-winning collection of 30 prose poems from John Scott.

Reviewing Scott’s most recent novel, N, for The Age in 2014, critic Peter Craven began: ‘Back in the late 1960s when drugs and Vietnam were all the go, when Albert Langer fomented revolution and Elijah Moshinsky directed plays, Monash University sported a young poet called John Scott. It was a good period and a good place for poetry: Scott’s fellow Monash poets included Alan Wearne and Laurie Duggan. But the man who looked and sounded like a poet, the one with the Dylan Thomas gift, was Scott.’

St Clair is evidence of that gift. First published in 1986, it won the Newcastle Poetry Prize and was joint winner of the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry.

John Scott is an award-winning poet and novelist, and the author of 16 books. These include the Victorian Premier’s Award-winning What I Have Written (1993), also part of the Untapped Collection, The Architect (2001) and, most recently N (2014).

New Selected Poems

by Philip Hodgins
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genre Poetry

Phillip Adams wrote of the poet Philip Hodgins that his ‘poems are as urgent and accessible as headlines, though infinitely more beautiful.’ Adding, ‘And you have to love a bloke whose favourite word was ‘paddock’.’ — The Weekend Australian

Selected Poems contains 148 poems by Philip Hodgins and was first published in 1997.

Philip Hodgins (1959–1995) was an Australian poet. His works include the multi-award-winning Blood and Bone (1986) and the NBC Banjo-winning Things Happen (1995). In 1986, he was awarded the Lesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry; in 1988, he was awarded the Grace Perry Memorial Award. The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal is given each year to a consistently outstanding Australian writer as part of the Mildura Writers’ Festival and recipients include Helen Garner, David Malouf, Frank Moorhouse, Gail Jones, Sonya Hartnett, Luke Davies, Clive James, Carmel Bird and Kate Jennings.

Selected Poems

by Vivian Smith
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genre Poetry

An important collection of 98 poems from an acclaimed Australian poet.

‘Vivian Smith is an outstanding lyrical poet…’ Michael Costigan, Australian Book Review

Vivian Smith is an award-winning poet, critic, and literary scholar who has edited multiple anthologies. His most recent book is Here, There and Everywhere (2012). He received the Patrick White Award in 1997. This collection was first published in 1985.

Michael Dransfield: a Retrospective

by Michael Dransfield
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genre Poetry

‘Michael Dransfield is now recognised as one of the most influential Australian poets,’ writes John Kinsella in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection that showcases Dransfield’s distinctive style: ‘often simultaneously streetwise and sophisticated, and intentionally “naive”’ but ‘always innovative, often unique’.

The poetry of Michael Dransfield (1948–1973) has appeared in literary journals and newspapers. His published collections include Streets of the Long Voyage (1970), Drug Poems (1972), and, posthumously, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (1975) and Voyage into Solitude (1978).

Collected Poems

by David Campbell
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genre Poetry

The collected works of one of Canberra’s early award-winning poets.

On the publication of this collection in 1989, after noting that the poems were in order of original publication, critic and poet Geoff Page wrote in The Canberra Times: ‘Beyond the simple satisfaction of enjoying once again such early favourites as Windy Gap and the clarity of late lyrics such as Lizard and Stone there is also the more complicated reward of watching a poet develop from a somewhat uncertain and ambitious attempt to combine two rather unlikely traditions (the English pastoral and the Australian ballad) to the easy confidence of his middle period (with poems such as Hotel Marine) to the challenging experimentation of his last books.’

David Campbell (1915–1979) grew up on the Monaro and lived near Queanbeyan but has long been claimed as a Canberra poet. His first published work was Speak with the Sun (1949). His other books include The Miracle of Mullion Hill: Poems (1956), Moscow Trefoil (1975), The Man in the Honeysuckle: Poems (1979) and Hardening of the Light: Selected Poems (2006). He received the Patrick White Award in 1975.