TWO TITLES
Laurie Brinklow's poetry collection
My island's the house I sleep in at night,
and
Pete Hay's essay collection
Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island's Soul
Laurie Brinklow | My island's the house I sleep in at night (2021)
"Being an islander means that you aren't like everyone else." Bounded by water, you can live your life with certainty knowing where your edges are. Drawn from interviews with artists from Newfoundland and Tasmania, these poems capture what it means to be an islander. To know every rock and tickle, "the sea your road/the hole in the sky/your light to travel by." In My island's the house I sleep in at night", Brinklow weaves stories and images with her own poetic imaginings. These are poems steeped in community memory, about belonging to a place like nowhere else, a kitchen party full of islanders telling stories about the patch of rock they call home.
Pete Hay | Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island's Soul (2019)
One of Tasmania's great, distinctive voices. Pete Hay illuminates the island in remarkable fashion, enriching our understanding of its
history, culture, politics and environment.
Tim Bonyhady
Pete Hay is pre-eminent among the guardians of Tasmania's island's spirit, his fierce intelligence and compassionate heart resisting those
who would ravage, exploit and appropriate its natural beauty, cultural creativity and fraught history for profit and power. Animals
and ancestors, people and plants, the lost and the loved, the humus and the human, the artist and the artefact, the books and the birds,
the sadness and the stillness, the past and the possible, the humour and the horror all find voice in Forgotten Corners.
For Pete Hay, home matters. He might be descended from a Point Peur boy and be the son of a legend of the 2/40th
Battalion, the 'Tasmanian' Battalion, but he does not claim belonging as a birthright: "You don't inherit place", he tells us, "you commit
to it".
James Boyce