FOUR TITLES – $55 (save 35%)
(includes free postage within Australia)
Nicola Bowery |
epicormic: new & selected poems (2025)
Lou Smith |
CLOUDBURST and CONSTELLATIONS (2025)
Kristyn J. Saunders | Slipstream (2025), and
Helga Jermy Time Piece (2024)
Nicola Bowery | epicormic: new & selected poems (2025)
This selection of Nicola Bowery’s poems spanning thirty years
and four collections highlights her attentiveness to the natural
world and to human relationships. It also includes epicormic,
new poems. A feature of the work is her sustained interest in the
sequence as a vehicle to inhabit a poetic forcefield: a mermaid’s
passage onto land, ‘Mothering words’, ‘A geography of marriage’,
an interrogation of memory and childhood. In the new poems the
poet, who lives beside tall eucalypt forest, is captivated by its
post-fire response. And finds evocative language for the
coincidental riddles of ‘covid time’
Lou Smith | CLOUDBURST and CONSTELLATIONS (2025)
Poignant and personal, these poems trace tender cartographies of
skin and kinship making drawn from genealogical topographies
that waver with grief in beautifully ‘concentric circles / of
unknowing.’ Smith pays close attention to the minutiae of life,
from ‘sunflecks’ that incur ‘a sharp intake of breath’ to histories
both natural and familial, especially in concurrence with
water-cycles both amniotic and migratory, telluric, oceanic,
and riverine. From Wales to the Caribbean, from Louisiana to
‘home’, this is a moving poetic portrait of places displaced, and
reunited, in distilled and sparkling form.
Shari Lynelle
Lou Smith’s elegiac poems interweave impacts of colonisation,
slavery, displacement and complications of ancestry, evoking
the ‘scaffold of who we are’ as ‘Drift Seeds’ born of complex,
violent histories. Meticulous environmental poems unseat
anthropocentrism, foregrounding toxified nature. When polystyrene icebergs ‘bob in wave breaks’ and spread ‘pearls of
polymer beans’, we feel the searing acuity of the poet’s gaze as
urgent poetic lamentation.
A. Frances Johnson
Lou Smith’s poems cling to you like your clothes dampened
by the rain. These are not just words on the page but breathing
journeys that you take, inhaling the moist air, listening to all
the sounds surrounding you, and knowing you inhabit a world
where nature dominates. Captivating!
Opal Palmer Adisa
Kristyn J. Saunders |
Slipstream (2025)
Slipstream registers a parent’s shifting interiority during
a young adult child’s hospitalisation. Its interwoven poetic
forms look back through histories of mental healthcare,
troubling the everyday, embodied, and institutional edges
of its immense present. Through its redactive practice and
miscellany of salvaged and imagined moments, Slipstream maps
a late season of maternal care, creating an open, generative
space for readers to inhabit.
“Through her mastery of form and deft handling of language,
Saunders adroitly juxtaposes the austerity of the historical with the poignancy
of immediate experience. Slipstream is a formidable and memorable debut.”
Jo Gardiner
“Evocative and moving, the reflections in Slipstream will resonate
with many readers who have traversed a similar terrain of care.”
Lee-Ann Monk
Slipstream is a luminous and bracing work of witness.
Its restraint is emotionally potent, its porous text worn and fragmented.
Saunders is a poet of exceptional lyric gifts, with the courage to situate
her speaker ‘like any other of many mothers’. A stunning debut.”
Felicity Plunkett
Helga Jermy | Time Piece (2024)
These poems explore time through the hourglass of self, reflecting on memories of family, work, place, socio-political change and the day-to-day cabin pressure of existence.
‘When you stop and free yourself from schedules, space opens
up and the world rushes in demanding to be understood. Helga
Jermy’s poems speak strongly of the breadth of experience that
can shape a life and the ways in which we continue to learn and to
understand ourselves, often in retrospect as the years accumulate.’
Anne Collins
This is Helga Jermy’s fourth collection of poetry. Her work has
been widely published and recognised in national and
international competitions. Born in England and now living on
Lutruwita-Tasmania’s northwest coast, her work explores life in
all its complexity.