Books by Sarah Tiffen

Sarah Tiffen's third book of poetry is full of the sensual imagery and textured observations for which she is becoming known. The sense of place and people resonates in these stories of life and love, connection to land, the struggle to survive, to belong, to reconcile. Here is Australian work, exploring Australian themes, familiar, yet renewed. There is something for everyone in this collection - work that can be read and reread to enjoy the subtleties and the beauty of the language, the depth of the narrative line. In the words of Donald Hall, fourteenth American poet laureate, 'Sarah Tiffen is writing some beautiful stuff.' 'Rain Event in the Whispering Country', which appears in this collection, was selected for publication in Best Poems of 2008 (UQP).

Sarah Tiffen's second collection continues to probe the spiritual and social themes revealed in her first book, Learning Country: Song Cycles from the Heartland. Stories of her home country, in the western plains of New South Wales, reveal a powerful response to place and a visceral sense of nostalgia, landscape and love. With story-poems, nature poems and spiritual explorations, this collection will speak to the reader of Australia, of a passing way of life, of family and history, and of the notions of home, time and loss and spirituality. Representing a development of the writer's craft, there is much in this volume to compel, challenge and uplift, as the reader will again take a journey into the heart, and share the love of language and of the country in evocative imagery.

Learning Country: Song Cycles from the Heartland is Sarah Tiffen's first collection of poetry. A lifetime of writing poetry has evolved to produce work of sometimes epic proportion, which explores a genuine Australian identity, imbued with history, spirituality and a sense of time and place, and evoking and celebrating the fabric of rural life. The 'songs' create a beautiful, evocative narrative of this life and these times, which is also timeless. And the reader is acutely aware of the omnipresence of the landscape itself, and nature, as the defining physical and spiritual entity in shaping identity. Centred on the life and landscape of farming communities in western NSW, in particular the author's home town of Leeton in the Riverina and its surrounding districts, these are celebratory stories of ordinary people and the spirituality that is inherent in the everyday, the things that may be lost if we don't try to record them imaginatively - the myths of an immigrant culture excavated, resurrected, critiqued. Learning Country may remind readers that poetry can be a map into ourselves, and that the journey is as important as the destination.

I acknowledge with deep respect the Wiradjuri Elders past and present, traditional custodians of the land that bore me and where the words I write were formed. The stories in these poems are all true and all come from that land between the three rivers - far western New South Wales - where my ancestors too lie buried.