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This collection had its beginnings in the shame, sadness and disbelief that was felt by many after the result of the Voice referendum in 2023. The poems here passionately express those reactions and also unflinchingly explore some of the truths about Australia and its history that, if they had been more widely known, might have led to a different result. It is hoped that readers will find solace, inspiration and hope in the pages that follow.

Within the verses of Growing Up, readers will embark on a journey through sorrow, love, emotions and challenges that shape our daily lives. This collection of raw and emotional poetry delves into the experiences of loss, heartache, friendship and hope, exploring the nature of human relationships with beauty, understanding and empathy. These poems about human experiences celebrate the joy, heartache and the pain of being human. Touching on issues such as suicide, mental illness, lost friendships, drug addiction, war and human endurance, these poems create a space for empathy and understanding in a world that can be dark and fragmented. Growing Up will touch your heart.

Diane Wahlheim has for many years worked in a culinary world. Her love of all things that tempt the palette and lift the senses has given her a satisfying and fulfilling career. Meandering beneath the layers of a fine food connoisseur, however, has ben a perpetual passion for poetry. Now retired and living in Aldinga Beach, Diane is enjoying the time she has had to take her fondness for rhymes, and other lines, a little further. In this book, her first full collection, she leaves the recipes behind and is, instead, cooking with words.

'Libby Sommer has a keen eye for extraordinary insights in the midst of the details of ordinary life, and for the striking verbal expression that captures the moral implications of what she has carefully observed. Hers is poetry that always rewards us with stimulated thought.' - Barry Spurr, Literary Editor, Quadrant; Australia's first Professor of Poetry

Warning: do not buy this book if all you want is a boring travel guide. Buy it only if you are interested in personal reflections and observations, mostly sane but some completely insane, history, and the odd poem for good measure, put together in 2022 in the post Covid lockdown era when I travelled from Port Albert to the tip of Cape York and back; about as far south to north as you can get on the Australian mainland.

'David Kelly has an uncanny ability to dissect the most mundane moments with unexpected bursts of insight. Laced with David's bizarre sense of humour, quartet is a collection of poetry like no other. It tantalises the senses and makes you reach deep into your own humanity to reflect upon snippets of time, real or imagined. From the environmental swirl of life in the forest, grasping the message from a dying man's handshake, memories of an expectant toddler, through to creating a regiment of the elderly with scooter trains, David's poetry is firing on all four cylinders.' - Suellen Drysdale, President, Goulburn Valley Writers Group'David Kelly continues his exciting quest to find different ways to write and present poetry. His fourth book quartet shows four of these ways. The first section contains prosaic paragraphs about everyday life in a country town, the second section has poems in the happy, primal voice of a child, the third section contains long descriptive poems about trees, birds and the families of the bush and the final section presents narrative poems about family struggles which read like a poetry novella. Kelly's poetry focuses on small but resonant details which celebrate aspects of an Australian way of life.' - Myron Lysenko

Midnight Radio explores the complex landscape of intimate attachments, offering nuanced, original perspectives on the ambiguities that pervade them. The collection reflects a clear-eyed intelligence and a sensibility at once ironic and vulnerable. Often conversational in tone, satisfyingly varied, these compact yet multi-layered poems, deeply observed even at their most playful, engage both heart and mind.'There is a hot black nerve running through Midnight Radio which Michael Sariban plays with unnerving lyrical confidence. This is a collection of poetry that gives a fiendish pleasure.' - Dorothy Porter'These poems glide beneath the eye, the lightness of their surface deceptive. Unapologetically direct, they chart a course through the debris of contemporary culture, mingling intimate reflection and sardonic detachment.' - Amanda Stewart'The poems are really sharp and clear and very stylish...a multi-pronged investigation of love and passion.' - Martin Duwell

'Dominic Kirwan's latest collection of poetry, Spreading the Bad Word, is jaw-droppingly delicious, and I say that as someone who does not usually consider myself a fan of the genre. Like a lot of people, I thought of poetry as the realm of greeting cards and teenage girls, but this is some great, grown-up stuff. Kirwan is a master craftsman of words, an architect that rummages through his vocabulary of nouns, adjectives, and verbs and then links them together to build tantalising towers of emotional intensity that will awe anyone lucky enough to read his finished masterpieces. This collection is not for the faint of heart. Kirwan will often leave the reader breathless as he whips his audience around the corners of his reality. You may never be quite sure if you are wandering through the poet's own mind or some nightmarish painting, bold in colour and shocking in its subject matter. Either way, you will be enthralled, perhaps a tad frightened, but entirely wanting to follow him down this dark alley and into the next. Each poem is its own chapter of life, some overlapping, but each a spectacular explosion of feeling. Whether addressing the unbearable realities of love, loss, religion, regret and death, Kirwan also uplifts in his unique way on subjects like gratitude and motherhood, and he is guaranteed to shock with his takes on abortion, social media, and loneliness. I consider it an honour to recommend this book to both the poetry geek and the non-believer. Let Kirwan introduce you to his unique world that is intimate, appalling, and delectable all at the same time.' - Grace Noble, English teacher, spectacular commentator extraordinaire

Incidental Dreams from a Myoclonic Jerk is Joe Bugden's first published collection of short stories. The collection is inhabited by characters drawn from unexceptional circumstances, whose lives are touched by love and loss, by regret and remorse, and who are placed in small and domestic settings as an examination of the everyday, and as a metaphor for the universal and ubiquitous conditions of life.

'Seasoned poets Jean McArthur and Linda M. Walker have captured the earthy and the ethereal. Keen observers of people, of moods past and present, they have splayed their poems to weave a strong poetic narrative, where "stories patch/together bits and pieces". Through highly-charged language and rich imagery Weather Eyes takes us on a journey to vivid album moments, of memories dark and light. Some scenes are blurry, others midday bright, or hazily surreal. Weather Eyes sparkles with originality, with fresh metaphor. Join two masters of their craft as they travel, feel, think, and imagine, distilling the intangible into words...from complex relationships of ash and anger to that great balancer of humanity, the positive power of the natural world. Trust McArthur and Walker's Weather Eyes to show you "patterns of the past and blue velvet tropic nights...old coats and worn shoes and a blue morning light on the sparrows bathing".' - Jude Aquilina

Cynthia Sidney Hallam grew up in Lismore and now lives in the Blue Mountains. Her short stories, poems and articles have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and her poems have been performed on stage and read on ABC radio. She has been awarded a Writing Fellowship Degree by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Going Forward is the tenth collection of her poetry publshed by Ginninderra Press.

The almost inescapable presence of TV advertising and social media in our lives means we are being constantly bombarded by information. News can be about devastation by natural forces, or the unspeakable atrocities of man's inhumanity to his fellow beings. We are exposed to the appalling behaviour of so-called world leaders and wonder why our young people find it so hard to believe in anything. Closer to home we struggle with broken relationships, illness, tragedy and loss. Coming to the end of 2023, I stopped to look at poems I had written during the year and was reminded of the small things that quietly filled me with joy and hope. They're things that aren't what would be called newsworthy but still they have value. As well as the big traumas, life is about noticing the simple pleasures...

Each stage in a person's life comes with different thoughts and feelings about life. For instance, it's often thought that the impressionability and sometimes impulsiveness of youth gives way to the sober reflections of mature age. Poetry is the perfect medium for capturing the evocations of different stages. The 'journey' of artists may also be evident in how well they have learned their craft, whether it be in music, art or literature. This book is a selection of the author's work over a period of thirty years that reflects this two-fold journey.

A care worker's unwise interest in a dementia client leads him into a dark labyrinth. A man intent on suicide happens on his doppelganger. An abandoned woman wonders whether her lover's crime might prove his love. Eight new stories to beguile and captivate.

What protection do females have from the social culture moulding the humans they develop into? The fourteen sharply perceptive tales in A Feminine Perspective celebrate the quiet courage within each woman's heart.

'Herein, we find poetry replete with eloquence and imagination, with the ages and stages of life, of dreamtime and daytime, heartache and humour. Within this book, we find the work of an artist who loves words, a writer who is in love with Creation itself. Each poem has a sense of story. Each one throbs with life being lived - the deep steady rhythm of our lives going on despite all, the ability of poetry to create light out of darkness, joy out of sorrow. Deep wisdom flows within each poem. Words are stitched like silken threads, to mend you, woven together to enfold you in the world of the poet and her poetry.' - Oriel Parker

Mark d'Arbon is a retired academic who has spent the greater part of his adult life teaching in a wide range of settings, including a couple of years in Papua New Guinea. He has been writing poetry for many of those forty years, having poems published in a variety of anthologies. The first collection of his own poems was published in 2018, titled Veranda People. This second collection is more reflective and has as its core theme aspects of life and the impact of death, although there is a sufficiently eclectic spread of poems not to make this book so depressing that you have to put it down in order to have a good cry.

'Carol Patterson deserves much wider recognition for her brilliant mastery of the short story form. Each story immerses the reader in an entirely different, vividly depicted setting with complex and contrasting characters. Patterson brings these characters to life as they confront a range of human dilemmas and emotional challenges. Her work is superbly crafted with control of syntax, voice and style.' - Janet Upcher'In these stories, there is a voice of wisdom, a voice of experience, a voice of clarity. The author has tremendous sensitivity to the characters, which allows her to breathe true insight into every scenario. They are the kind of people one may meet in day-to-day life and often encourage us to pause and reflect on our own experiences in comparable scenarios. There is a dynamic interplay between the physical surroundings and history of each narrative with the impact on the characters' thoughts and reflections. Above all, the writing has grace and elegance.' - Dr Paul Goodey-Adevisyan

In the title story of this collection, Alysson was raised to believe in a sisterhood of women. She is plunged into a world where the 'sisters' are twisted. Women set her up at work by a malicious prank. A manager tries to molest her. These events occur in the stories set in a fictitious agency where she is a badly treated casual. In 'Bad Neighbours', Trudy, Alysson, the owner of the property, and most of the street, are victimised, any hour of the day and night, by a rowdy drug fiend, Trixie. while police and public health agencies are only concerned about Trixie's civil rights and political correctness. Unexpected allies come up with a shady solution. Alysson meets a sinister character in 'Death at a Railway Station' and a few snake charmers in 'The Snake Charmer'. In the final stories, a feisty, red-haired private investigator, Kristy, tracks down various mysterious characters, including a runaway house wife, Isobel, Lindsay, a university student, and his mysterious wife, Tamsin. Kristy also searches for a mysterious hacker who isn't what he seems. She is put in danger by a shady character in 'The Cult'.

Voracious is a mythical beast. He lives on profits and is always hungry. A Midas beast, all he touches becomes a commodity. He appears in or is hinted at throughout this collection of beautifully crafted poems. In her seventh poetry collection, Karen Throssell includes poems about obesity and anorexia, agribusiness, diets and fads, the supermarket duopoly, starvation as a weapon of war, food additives, ultra-processed food, gluttony and greed. So the book is about the politics of food, its transformation via the capitalist economy from produce to product, and the resultant rise in 'pretend food' - food which is highly addictive but has no nutritional content. The seriousness of the subject matter is lightened with the author's characteristic quirky wit, by the inclusion of 'odes' to various fruit and vegetables, poems about food and family, and food traditions. There is much to be discovered and much to smile at in this important and highly accessible book.

It was during the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-601) that China first introduced tea to Japan, but the gentle art of tea drinking did not fully take root until the Southern Song Dynasty (AD 1127-1279) when a Japanese monk called Eisai returned from the Zhejiang Province, bringing with him the seeds for the first plantations and the principles of the Tea Culture. Eisai's book on the subject, Kissa Y¿j¿ki, began with the sentence 'Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one's life more full and complete.' Building on another ancient tradition, utamonogatari (poem stories), Amelia Fielden brings us Mint Tea from a Copper Pot & other tanka tales. Coming from 'a nation of tea-drinkers', I do not underestimate the significance of this everyday tradition. A cup of tea is curative, calming, ceremonial. For many of us, it is almost an act of ritual. It can be solitary, meditative, but like a memory, allowed to steep a while, it is made for sharing. It is comfort in a crisis, or while we wait for news. In her tanka tales, Amelia Fielden invites us to partake of these recollections of a long life, well-lived, a life filled with love, loss and longing; whether we are sipping Ceylon tea from porcelain cups in Japan, orange pekoe from the best china in an English country garden, mint tea behind wrought-iron gates and bolted cedar doors in the midst of a Moroccan revolution, or green tea in a temple precinct as we contemplate a dancing black butterfly, we are fully involved in Amelia's experience. Moreover, the eponymous mint tea from a copper pot is the image that permeates the collection and lingers long after it is finished. Mint: sharp, tantalising, refreshing, so exciting to the palate. Copper: the metal that redoubles the richness of a flame's reflection. The poet's mind is a fire bowl for memory, the 'sunset fire' that 'flares above the charcoal mountain rims'. This is a collection to savour and to return to again and again.Claire Everett, Tanka Prose Editor, Haibun Today, Editor, Skylark Tanka Journal

These poems have been a lifetime in the making. A lifetime filled with love, joy, work, longing and loss. A lifetime that came to an end too soon in between the writing and publishing of this work. So these poems tell John Harper's story, from birth to death and everything in between.

Five Ordinary Men is a collection of five stories, each focusing on a different man, though the reader may think the book title is a misnomer and question whether some or all of the men are 'ordinary' at all. One man inexplicably commits a terrible crime, and relates aspects of his life trying to explain his actions both to himself and others. Another's memories of his close friend are reawakened when shown six varied photographs of their shared lives. Another wrestles with guilt and the disenchantment of his partner for not having intervened to help a stranger being attacked. Another's extraordinary shyness, or something more, affects his relationship with a shy woman. And another is impacted by self-doubt and loss of self-esteem from a student's complaint that he assaulted her. Taken together, these varied stories present a wide range of insights into the human condition.

Fulfilling a lifelong dream and buying a rural property, the writer is surprised to discover the farm becomes a rich source of poetic inspiration. This collection is the outcome of over three decades of reflection and writing about the joys and sorrows of a small farmer. With boyhood memories of Australian wheat-belt farms and ideas from Wendell Berry's agrarian writing, the author sets out to discover his own reality of farming on this hillside property. 'Get big or get out' is perhaps the counter mantra of this collection, as the struggle to find sufficiency in being small and unprofitable defines the lived experience of farming. Deeper considerations emerge, as a growing awareness of the destructive nature of Australian agriculture tempers any romantic notions of 'life on the land'. In the end, it is the agrarian spirit, the sense of a true community of nature, which activates and sustains this collection.

Wendell Watt lives in Sydney. Apart from family, her two loves have been science and writing. She chose science for a secure livelihood but now writing takes top place. Her work has been published in newspapers, journals and anthologies and has won various prizes, and a poetry chapbook Oranges Grow on Trees was published by Ginninderra Press. Her poems take inspiration from the natural world, and reflect on a range of life experiences and the humorous absurdities that crop up along the way.

Stories of laughter and tears. A jealous young woman is trapped in remote bushland. Should she save her husband or let him die? A man travelling on top of a train during the Depression hurtles towards a tunnel not knowing if his head will be chopped off. Wartime prime minister, Ben Chifley, spins the chocolate wheel in a country town. An Irish wharfie juggles the moral dilemma between church and rugby during the militant Apartheid years. Which should he choose? The 1940s crooner Bing Crosby features in a moment of closeness between father and daughter. A set of Encyclopaedia Britannica leads a young mother straight to a charity shop in search of the meaning of sex. Other stories tell of the fear and danger of being alone on a remote snow-covered volcano; a confronting brush with the law and a conversation with a disinterested cat; a curly-haired boy whose mother is a chain-smoker; a teenager's near-death experience; and the whispered secrets of an old house.

In her first full-length collection of poetry, Tarla Kramer recounts the final days of her husband's life and her long journey of grief as a mother with four young children.'Tango of the Widow is a poignant depiction of the death of a loved husband, as Tarla Kramer relives the progression of his illness and her grief and sense of loss. She writes with a raw energy, bringing to life the desolation of his departure and the pain of memories, in a charting of the time from diagnosis to her gradual re-emergence in the years after his death. The book is a brave and ultimately hopeful account of the way one copes with tragedy.' - Valerie Volk, author of In Due Season, Marking Time, In Search of Anna'These poems compel by their matter-of-factness, as they unflinchingly confront the reality of sickness and death. They move us by their precision, restraint and gravity. Those who are grieving or trying to understand their grief-stricken neighbour will benefit from reading this book.' - Aidan Coleman

A Life Deserves Nine Cats is a collection of poems and drawings of cats by Sue Schindler and Ron Heard. Tough and tender. Vivid and well observed. Never sentimental. A book for cat lovers and for readers of poetry.'If you have ever known, or loved or mourned a cat, these poems and portraits will insinuate themselves into your affections in a familiar way. The poems and artwork capture, with grace, agility and wit, the mysterious wiles of cats and the charmed lives they lead with their human companions.' - Jena Woodhouse'The first poem I ever published was titled "I hate cats". So, if I tell you I love this small collection of cat poems, you may get an inkling of how fine it is. Funny, insightful, moving and subtly crafted, these poems by Ron Heard are a pleasure to read for non-cat lovers: I imagine for cat lovers they might almost be Cat Heaven.' - Andrew Lansdown'Sue Schindler's drawings are cats we immediately recognise: in the weight of a paw lying just so, in a density of sleep and in a sudden, acute awareness.' - Joanne Horniman

'Home is a profound and tangled experience that reaches far beyond the physical space. This wise, beautifully edited selection of poetry and prose lays bare the universal longing to belong. Humorous, comforting and devastating, Cycles in Light maps the emotional and physical geography of home, inviting readers on a word journey through sanctuary and identity, love and loss, isolation and connection. Cycles in Light is a testament to the power of story to illuminate the places, people and things that shape our lives and leave indelible marks on our hearts.' -Katherine McLean, Hunter Writers Centre Director

'The majority of poems in The Persistence of History describe Graeme Hetherington's engagement with David Keeling's paintings. As a form of ekphrasis, Hetherington's responses to Keeling's art are rarely detailed descriptions of the paintings themselves, but rather personal responses to the works evoking memories of his own life's circumstances and reflections on the human condition. The subjects of Keeling's "Young Couple in Developing Landscape 1988", "Frontier Foundation 1994" and "To The Island 1989" stimulate memories of the poet's unhappy first marriage by focusing on particular features of the paintings that sharpen the tragedy of that relationship - the movement of the "Glover-eucalypts" that "asphyxiate", the "convict-dug pit" representing the fall into the "hell of splitting up" compounded by the symbolic image of the pitchfork. Similarly, in poems responding to Keeling's "Veil 1991-92", "Gate 1994", "Curios 1999" and "Everything Must Go 2003", Hetherington remembers his mother living in her "insane interior" veiled by drawn blinds and curtains, his "granny" who only lifted the veil of her black hat to terrify the young poet, and the gate at his home's entrance on which he would perch to greet his grandfather after work and which protected him from "Bully-boys living opposite". But more striking is the poet's "reading" in Keeling's paintings of an "ecologically debased / And troubled earth" facing "irreversible defeat" as "the ultimate corpse". The strength of Hetherington's response to this theme is conveyed by brutal imagery depicting the world as a concentration-like gaol in which we "dance with death" in a devastated landscape which has become a "massive mastectomy" of "dry mounds / Arranged in pairs like shorn-off breasts". Hetherington accuses humankind of "fouling" the earth. His depictions of the desecration of the symbols and rituals of the Christian Mass, and his questioning of the nature of Christ's Second Coming in response to Keeling's "Shroud 1994", "The Cunning Fox 1998", "Other Edens 1998" and "Plenty 1994", reinforce the poet's feelings of misanthropy. The poet's ultimate despair for the future of humankind is portrayed in his engagement with Keeling's "The Persistence of History 1994". Using the timeless images of art and the theatre, the poet suggests that conflict, dispossession and murder have always been a part of the human condition, as have people's indifference to such states of being. Confronted by this "theatre of the absurd", the poet finds some reprieve and even redemption in Keeling's two paintings of "The Road 2002" where light appears to create "cooling transparent pools" and ultimately becomes a healing "blaze". - Ralph Spaulding