Books by Dominique Hecq

Dominique Hecq's latest collection is an autobiographical journey into the real and imaginary of Australia. With her 'faux-Romantic' preconceptions, Hecq arrives in Australia from Europe in 1985, after a long fascination with the literature of a country she would eventually call home. Spanning thirty years, Tracks fictionalises this journey of uncovering the complex layers of a foreign land and of discovering its people, places and prejudices.

Dominique Hecq writes through dulled topographies of mourning, avowing death is a "singular fear of finitude against a background of black light." Autobiographical, and sharply particular, Hush takes readers into an abyss where "grief is a caesura" and loss means "being hostage to a ghost." But this book is not only a poignant elegy to "losing your mother tongue and cracking your own voice"; Hush is also an incandescent lament from an "un / harmed" speaker locating the possibilities and lexicons of denouement. Silencing the undertones of a surpassing grief, Hecq's quest is finally epic and heroic. - Dan Disney "Life goes on, they say," says Dominique Hecq in her startling and moving new book of lined and prose poetry, Hush. Then, "Life goes on leaving." A response to the death of a child, charting the near death and revival of a marriage and family, Hush is the lyric meditation of a true scholar, deeply inflected by theory but driven by the urgencies of the body. Early and late, it poses unanswerable questions - "Why is white white?" - and answers them by returning to the world of "Chalk, rice, zinc / / Crystal falls / / " and, devastatingly, "Limestone graves," before the language of the world disintegrates. Seeming at first to span a year of seasons, then suddenly encompassing fifteen years, the poem charts a remarkable inner journey, which begins in starvation, a refusal of the sensuous, but finally recollects not joy so much as presence. The world reemerges in water, birds, flowers, and most of all food, prepared at first as sacrifice, for others, until it makes itself present - first through color but also through smell, through sound, and literally through ink - and becomes the poet's communion. - Katharine Coles, University of Utah

Out of Bounds is a sequence of poems in three parts. It is a double story of dislocation that explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist's experience of migration and motherhood. It draws together the two strands to reveal a subject at pains to re-define herself through language in a space circumscribed by sexuality, culture, and post-colonial politics. Succinct and astonishingly vivid, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form.

Stretchmarks of Sun is informed by the crossing of borders-geographical, historical, formal and subjective. It explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist's experience of dislocation and reconnection. It is poetry that draws together strands plucked from different disciplines, ways of knowing and art forms to reveal how home is made out of love and language.

This book is a study of the poetics of creative writing as a subject in the dramatically changing context of practice as research, taking into account the importance of the subjectivity of the writer as researcher. It explores creative writing and theory while offering critical antecedents, theoretical directions and creative interchanges.