This volume collects all of Fay Zwicky's poetry, including previously uncollected and unpublished poems. It reveals an erudite, passionate, and highly inventive poet, whose consummate control of her craft places her at the summit of Australian poetry.

This broad selection of Australian poets begins with Kenneth Slessor, and offers a challenging view of 'early modern' poetry up until the 1960s. It also presents the decade of turmoil from 1965 to 1975 in a new light, identifying currents of energy among the young writers and balancing new reputations with old. The years from 1965 to the 1990s are revealed as a time of growing vigour and diversity.

WhenJ.S. Harry died in 2015 she was acknowledged as one of the great female poetsof her generation, alongside Fay Zwicky, Antigone Kefala, Jennifer Maiden and JudithRodriguez. Thiscommemorative volume gathers poems from all her collections, as well as newpoems written in the last years of her life. As the use ofinitials in her writing name suggests, Jann Harry was a very private person. Shewas also gentle, kind, solicitous and endlessly curious - she would probe,enquire, pursue - everything seemed interesting to her. And she had anotherquality which was extraordinary, and which, along with her shyness andcuriosity, is such a powerful presence in her poetry: this was herattentiveness to the life of the natural world and its creatures. Her poems typicallytake a quizzical stance, which holds a strange or complex moment up to scrutiny,and then pursues its implications. Her attention is caught by the smallesteffects of nature, the delicate responses of animals - and also the gestures andwords of humans, finely observed, with a sense of the mystery or menace theycontain. The effect may be comic or surreal - or fierce, in its condemnation ofoppression. Her mastery of the poetic line - the pause, the sudden shiftin emphasis or perspective - and above all her interest in language, enhancethese effects. PeterPorter rightly declared Harry to be 'the most arresting poet working inAustralia today'. The poems included in SelectedPoems were chosen by J.S. Harry herself, and her long-time friend, the poetNicolette Stasko.

Andrew Lansdown’s latest poetry collection, Abundance, contains poems from eleven of his earlier collections and poems that are previously uncollected. These poems gain power from the poet’s mastery of poetic form and technique. They range widely in theme, tone, style, and subject—from an aboriginal man playing the digeridoo in prison to a widow addressing a prophet in Phoenicia; from kangaroos crossing a firebreak to a man asleep in a library; from the emptiness of black bamboo to the fullness of a father’s heart; from a pregnant mother dying for the faith in shogunal Japan to the poet’s mother joining an American-style sacred-harp choir in heaven. This collection offers readers an abundance.

Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm again as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. Previous contributors include Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, Fiona Wright, Clive James, Lisa Gorton, Robert Adamson, Dorothy Porter, John Kinsella, David Malouf, Cate Kennedy and Les Murray. Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of The Hazards (UQP, 2015), which won the poetry prize at the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and Aria (UQP, 2008), which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Award, and the FAW Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology and the poetry editor of Island.

Judith Beveridge is one of Australia's most highly regarded poet, author of three award winning poety collections: The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace and Wolf Notes (winner of both the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry and the Queensland Premier's Judith Wright Calanthe Poetry Prize. Ger work is widely studied in schools and universities. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, and is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgkins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature.

"Acanthus offers a collection of poems that dwell in the landscapes of the northern and southern hemispheres, evoking myth and fantasy and romance, as they move between observation and imagination. At the heart of Potter's poetry is a keen awareness of the power of transformation, which brings the celestial and the physical, the imagined and the real closer to hand.The poems hold an ear to those wandering figures who, like Icarus, search the peripheries of those adjoining worlds for a way through, but instead often fall against the clockwork of the ordinary. Surreal gardens, repetitive geometry, rooms of clouds, witches and monsters, lie not outside the natural world but directly within it, mixing poetry and quotation, dream with prose. Each poem coexist at an angle to the next, sitting as if within the net of a wider page, seeking to embody the dramatic sense of reading and of falling right through its spaces." -- Publisher information.