FOUR TITLES – $56 (save 30%)
(includes free postage within Australia)
Tric O’Heare’s & Ross Donlon’s
G & S: Ghazals and Sonnets in Conversation (2025),
Louise Oxley's
Range Light (2025)
Julie Maclean's Eye (2024), and
Kathryn Fry's To Speak of Grasses (2025)
Tric O’Heare’s & Ross Donlon’s G & S: Ghazals and Sonnets in Conversation (2025)
Two authors, two poetic forms, a necklace of free association:
this is an innovative concept for a new collection of poems
in which two people’s memories correspond and bounce off
one another, poem by poem, so that the whole becomes a
richly imagined chain of response.
Sarah Day
Poetry is sometimes seen as a solitary business – but
for centuries poets have been defying this notion by
collaborating with each other – think of the renga tradition
in Japan. Ross Donlon and Tric O’Heare have invented a
unique new collaboration – a ghazal from him, a sonnet
from her, responding to each other. The connections are
sometimes clear from subject, image or word association,
sometimes quite lateral. The result is a wide-ranging, dualvoiced collection of terrific poems in the chosen forms.
Mike Ladd
Louise Oxley's
Range Light (2025)
Louise Oxley’s Range Light is a work of quiet accumulation. Attuned to the world and her place in it,
Oxley writes with a deft line and precise gravity. In poems that take in the details—where to gather dulse, the
“empty, delicate angles” of discovered bones, the moment when “autumn sun has steadied at the hilltop”—Range Light inducts
the reader into a world thick with life and feeling and inquiry. Oxley reveals wonder at the “true, clear/ account of
Nature’s phenomena” and invites the reader to experience the same wonder.
Kate Middleton
Poetry Editor, Island
There is a moment in Range Light in which the skeletal remnants of an animal
are perceived as ‘loss in scrambled code’. This is beautifully suggestive of
Louise Oxley’s achievement – whether focussing on loss, hope, mortality, love,
or the ambiguous presence of the natural world, her poems are always seeking
to unscramble the codes in which the mysteries of experience come to us.
Ross Gillett
Range Light is the powerful reward of waiting sixteen years to publish. There
is a deep maturity in Louise Oxley’s detailed and original observations of
history, nature, art and land. With a richness of language, each word is placed
in the line to expand, encompass and challenge. The way time tangles and
untangles – forward and backward, in circularity, or on directed pathways –
underlies much in the book. Acutely aware, like Citizen Riche in 1792, Oxley
is ‘seeing always, what is different from the known’, making connections with
the nature of our own inner world as well as our politics in the broadest sense,
a tender subtlety in the handling of her subject matter. With the guidance of
these poetic ‘range lights’ we move into an open understanding.
Robyn Rowland
Julie Maclean's Eye (2024)
Eye is a work of careful observation deftly told through sharp imagery.
Maclean’s poems inhabit a slippage between Earth and self, where an
Earth-self imaginary develops in the fractures of relationship. Alert to
the violences of colonisation and guided by Maclean’s intelligent use
of language, Eye is both unsett ling and compelling.
Anne Elvey
Julie Maclean focuses her gaze on the grandeur and minutiae of a new
country, the diversity and eccentricities of the modern world. Hers is
a mission of ‘loving everything equally’: baby echidnas, 3D printers,
anime, kangaroo paws. Maclean renders it all vivaciously, even as she
mourns the unspeakable tragedy of climate change.
Maria Takolander
With a binocular eye the poems in Eye notice everything, from the
smallest snail to the dangerous territory of relationships. Here poet
Julie Maclean assumes the role of both outsider/insider, a kind of
mystic sage of rich and luscious language. These are Blake-like, poems
that “see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
John Bartlett
Alert and attentive, Julie Maclean’s Eye is quick yet focused in its
gaze, forming worlds anew and closely felt. These poems hold scenes
of ‘melon light’, with ‘two dolphins / one for each eye’, ‘bumblebees
the size of fairy wrens’, and birds ‘growling ... like dogs’. Traversing
landscapes inviting and violent—haunted by colonial violence—
Maclean’s language is colloquial and eloquent, nimble and expansive.
With ‘eyes everywhere’, her poems show how what is troubling or
dangerous can be rendered ‘So easy through the lens’.
Jo Langdon
Kathryn Fry's To Speak of Grasses (2025)
Kathryn Fry’s poems in To Speak of Grasses are luminous with insight
and attention. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and with an ear as attuned to
a Beethoven concerto as to the symphonies of the bush, she juxtaposes
the evolution of land and lifeforms from first cells to family. In linking
the fibre of grasses—whether in the desert, forest or underwater or
the strange forms of grass trees and the humped mounds growing
the land of the Pilbara—to the fibre of being, Fry hits that sweet spot
between observation and contemplation again and again.
Dael Allison
Kathryn Fry’s poems in To Speak of Grasses combine admirable
precision with equally impressive lyricism. Her clear descriptions
of the natural world are carefully scientific as well as poetic. Plants,
landscape, animals, her family and others are treated with the same
close observation and love.
Jenny Blackford
Kathryn Fry has a dazzling ability to be both intensely present in the
everyday world and deeply thoughtful about our connections to the
past and the future. Whether she is caring for a grandchild, swimming
with whale sharks or nurturing seeds for renewal of her beloved
bushland, her poems are rich with precise observation of the natural
world and a moving generosity of spirit. Equally at home with virtuosos
in the Opera House, the silent messages of spinifex or a koel calling
in a memory from childhood, this book is a delight: a collection which
speaks on every page of the complex joy of being alive.
Jean Kent