Books published by Ginninderra Press

';This a stunning late debut, a memorable cache of poems of mature, quiet and numinous power that has waited a lifetime to be written. They draw their inspiration and insights from the deep earth, from the artesian well of time and memory, and map ways of connection with the land, and with the forgotten places within the soul. Poems like ';Driving Inland' and ';Touch and Flow' simply took my breath away, their journeys through brilliantly observed landscapes answering the question that the poems pose so beautifully and heartbreakingly: ';The tiny dash between birth and death / is all we have on this earth. / Where do I go from here?'' Kim Cheng Boey

A Sparrow Splashing is a journey into the heart of the Buddha's teachings. This book of stories and poetry looks at the life of the author through the eyes of three characters: a child named Little Pebble, a young man called the Seeker, and the Teacher, a Buddhist Monk. The reader is invited to reflect and meditate upon the universal search for happiness and the nature of suffering. Along the way, desire, anger, ignorance, jealousy and pride are encountered in various forms. This book explores Buddhism, and spirituality in general, beyond sectarian dogma, pointing the way to perfect wisdom and compassion, the essential nature of all beings.

I want my poetry to say something about the state of our world, this catastrophic social and environmental situation we are bringing on ourselves. So my work is social critique and revolves around dissent, contradiction, dissonance; and I write about gender, violence, war, refugees and asylum, environment and climate change. I am fascinated by the fluidity of gender, of femininities and masculinities. One of my favourite texts is Orlando by Virginia Woolf and it is full of the poetry of gender.

'Jane Williams's first collection of haiku delights with all the insight and generosity that her readers admire in her longer works of poetry. In distillations that are alive to the small and fleeting moments of life and the echoes they ring in the heart, Echoes of Flight is joyous and life-affirming and a welcome addition to Australian haiku literature.' - Lyn Reeves, Vice President, Australian Haiku Society'Echoes of Flight is a wonderful treasure box of haiku moments experienced through finely tuned poetic senses. These moments are captured in crisp detail, displaying a profound reverence for the world in which the poet so keenly observes. We are richer for seeing things as Jane Williams does.' - Ron C. Moss, author of the award-winning haiku collection The Bone Carver

In the 1990s, Julia Honeychurch moves to Canberra with her new husband Brian to take up a position at a school for troubled children. When the marriage sours, Julia learns that, in Canberra, it's difficult to keep secrets. She's fallen in love with Kate Selby, a university lecturer and consultant at Julia's school. Kate and Julia's clandestine meetings take her away from the family and arouse Brian's suspicions. When twelve-year-old Rose Cavanaugh joins her special unit, Julia clashes with Rose's abusive stepfather Lee over his treatment of Rose and Rose's mother. Animosity spirals into dangerous territory, imperils Kate and Julia's secret life, and brings a night of murder to the city.

Poems collected from All the Time Left, Laughing in the Street and The Question, the Answer a smorgasbord of thoughts and ideas ranging from sardines, crayfish in pots, the Blarney stone, a Degas painting, blowflies and wild things to Cicero and the dustman, reflecting Nance Cookson's wry take on life.

';Gabe Journey Jones's poetry uniquely combines words and rhythm into recipes for healing, conversing and connecting with ourselves and one another. Her libretti are astute, set to bars, accents, BPM (beats per minute) and broken-up beats; they pulsate like the sanctuary of a mother's heartbeat and become Spoken Medicine.' Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, Director, South Coast Writers Centre, writer and facilitatorPassionate, percussive poetry written for performance that slams complacency and oppression with urgency and compassion. She's a priestess, exhilarating incantations heard accompanied by her drumming, divines the hidden and can heal a sick society. This is a magical potion.' Jenni Nixon, poet, writer and mentorGabrielle's collection of poetry is dazzling in its scope and intensity. The medicine gets to all the neglected parts of ourselves. Readers are in for a thought-provoking treat. It is wonderful that the world of spoken word is graced by a poet of such fierce integrity and poetic vitality.' Wilfred C. Roach, poet, writer and performerI love nothing more than a fierce woman unafraid to speak loud truths, a counter voice to the dominant narratives which are not necessarily the real narratives. Gabe is all of that and more. This collection will certainly light a fire in your belly and spark something in your heart.' Candy Royalle, artivist, writer, poet, storyteller and performance artist

Ladies, a plate please charts the life of Elizabeth Macguire, from childhood to middle age, in her quest for identity and selfhood. Activist, lover, sister, friend, Elizabeth follows her own rebellious star, beginning in rural sixties Australia in a family fractured by a child's death and the damaging silence of unexpressed grief. Her journey takes her through youthful romances to a complex and volatile relationship with Sarah, who seeks to reconcile her own family history of loss in a way which inevitably conflicts with Elizabeth's desire for autonomy. Wry, evocative and humorous, Ladies, a plate please is about struggle, change and the secrets people keep, from themselves and each other.

A former lecturer in Greek, Roman and Ancient Near Eastern history and literature at the University of Tasmania, Graeme Hetherington has spent much of his adult life living at large in Europe and Turkey to be closer to the source of his subject matter. More often than not, his response to his culturally charged surroundings has taken the form of poems rather than scholarly books and articles, as this collection, his sixth, bears out.

Edna Taylor has always enjoyed writing but it wasn't until much later in life she really became interested in the craft of penmanship, especially in the form of short story writing. Readers of her two previous collections of stories will recognise some of the characters who have seemingly taken on a life of their own and made their way into this third book. The stories in The Attic are works of fiction, apart from ';The Dust Storm', which is an account of one of the eventful happenings experienced by the author's family when living on an isolated outback farm in the wild South Australian bush.

The craft in this, Graeme Hetherington's third collection of poems, is like that of the tapestry maker. In short lyrics of sinewy tetrameter and assonantal music, the poet's dark and bright strands of narrative, of thematic concern, are interwoven in a technique that allows the shape of an individual life to disclose itself from the commingling and recurrence of vivid personal and historical recollections. In the individual lyrics there are scenes of chill home life and school barbarities. These are haunting and intimate in their disclosures. In the cumulative effect of the poems a pattern emerges, similar to those that the Icelandic tapestry makers abstracted from their own harsh saga and mythic sources. For Graeme Hetherington takes hinterland Tasmania, with its hellish past of floggings, cannibalism, killings, and weaves into this the pattern of his own experience, his exposure to cruelty, his friendship with James McAuley, his exile in foreign lands, his intimations into Christianity and Christian art. These are lyrics of remarkable self-scrutiny, an older poet's fierce struggle to find pattern in the life given.

Being denied access to a place by necessity you invent it. In these poems, the author explores cultural identity and loss as the daughter of an Estonian dislocated from his family and country by post-war turmoil. Based on fractured truths, fairy tales and longings, this collection is a personal mosaic of a land and her place in it.

On a lonely highway in the middle of the night, two teenage Aboriginal girls are killed in a crash. Like rag dolls, their bodies are thrown from the Toyota Hilux when it rolls at high speed. One suffers massive internal injuries. The other has her ear and scalp torn off. They bleed out in the dirt. A drunk middle-aged white man crawls out of the crashed ute. It's after midnight. He spreads a green plastic sheet on the stony ground. He drags the dead fifteen-year-old onto the tarp and pulls her pants down. He pushes her top up, exposing her breasts. He tries to have sex with her. He stretches out with his arm across her breasts and goes to sleep. The police charge him. He hires a criminal lawyer from the big end of town. An anonymous benefactor pays his expensive legal costs. The case drags on. Two years later, he fronts court. He walks. This story is about the justice system that saw Alexander Ian Grant acquitted of killing Mona Lisa Smith and Jacinta Rose Smith and of a charge of indecently interfering with fifteen-year-old Jacinta when she was dead. It describes the sad events which led to their violent deaths. It analyses the police case, which was so fragmented that it failed to gain a conviction. It seeks to understand what caused the deaths of the girls, why the police got it so wrong and how the accused walked away from the crash without a scratch and away from the court a free man.

Dick, a disillusioned husband and lawyer living in a middle-class 1997 London suburb, stands dressed in period costume on a railway platform. Dick is convinced he is in the middle of a dream but his adventures become ever more curious, tantalising and amazingly real!He shares a compartment with some country folk travelling to old London Town. On arrival and confused by his surroundings, Dick meets magistrate Henry Fielding, who kindly offers him lodgings in this year of 1779. As he looks for answers within the mystery of his unbelievable journey, he comes across a crude poster nailed to a tree, with the image of a girl wanted for witchcraft. The face is disturbingly familiar and when he meets by chance a dark Gypsy woman, the mystery deepens and he is taken into realms he could only have dreamed ofsurely.

Susan Fitzgerald has told stories to herself from childhood and has written since she was a teenager. She has had her work published in Under the Rainbow, a collection of work by U3A writers, and in Tamba. Now there's this book, which offers tales of the mischief of boys as they grow into men and of women who have moved on from the choices of girls.

Thomas Hardy once said, ';A tale must be exceptional enough to justify its telling.' I think my story is exceptional. Maybe you will think so too. Whatever one thinks, I have learnt through this story the value of persistence, patience, positive attitude and perseverance such precious qualities in life. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but one has to find the way there.

Cicada Chimes is set over a twenty-four-hour period covering several years in time lapse; it moves from a funeral service in Rookwood, to a honeymoon in Paris, to the morning markets in Serres, Greece, and a church service in Surry Hills. The twenty-four-hour time structure is Helen Koukoutsis' way of exploring the effects of her father's death and mother's grief on her Australian-Greek Orthodox identity. Written with understated humour, these poems smile at the tensions between marriage and motherhood, memory and forgetfulness, and life and death. ';Poignant, bittersweet memories. A journey from Greece to Australia, to Europe and back into the Ithaca of one's self. Poems that are lean, stripped to the bones of language with the calm tenacity of Emily Dickinson. Helen Koukoutsis questions tradition, religion, society, academia, her own strengths and frailties as a daughter, sister, wife, mother. And all the while the chimes of the cicadas in Rookwood Cemetery are ringing in her ears, following. Forever.' Peter Skrzynecki OAM';In her impressive debut collection, Helen Koukoutsis moves among ';homes and tables' from coastal Greece to suburban Australia, across Europe and over the span of literature to bring us a new poetry of everyday experience. These stories of love and grief are threaded together with vitality and care. Kasseri, cicadas and ';thirsting dianthus' crowd together alongside mothers, lovers and daughters. Koukoutsis writes deftly, in sure measure, with Emily Dickinson at one hand and Virginia Woolf at the other.' Kate Fagan

';Renowned songwriter Joe Dolce has long outgrown the pop lyric and moved into a risky domain where recitative, comedy, folk and slapstick build shelters for themselves among social commentary and the poetry of lists. He has a foot, or feet, in diverse realms serious and entertaining and has resolved that he will never record another song that has not been first published as a stand-alone poem. No colleague to his knowledge has yet ventured into this territory yet its potentials for escape from the shiftily High Serious and the narrow criteria of academic critique are obvious. Wit, and the songwriter's freedoms of seeing one's creations recorded by others, are possible bases for a jazz-like shift in the profession of poetry, and music remains available to float logjams that commentary is apt to desiccate. Since coming to Quadrant as a regular contributor, he has built a real following for his work, and we'll miss him when his vogue spreads beyond our pages.' Les Murray

Born in a blizzard, Les Leong is adopted into a Chinese-Australian family. He grows up in the declining gold town of Kiandra in the NSW Snowy Mountains and lives through a time in Australia now long past. Les lives the life of a bushman among a captivating array of characters. He has adventures and misadventures in the city too. As Les ages, he learns what Australia and the high country really mean, and pursues a quest for understanding bequeathed by Aboriginal forebears. Seeing Through Snow is a captivating blend of imagination and history.

Jennifer Chrystie's poems have been published widely in Australia as well as in the UK and US. Her first poetry collection, Polishing the Silver (Ginninderra Press, 2006) was commended in the Fellowship of Australian Writers Anne Elder Award.';This is a thoughtful and diverse collection, rich with imagery Intensely observant and memorable' Lorraine McGuigan, Poetry Monash

';There's a touch of both Dickinson and Larkin in Jennifer Chrystie's mature exhumation of the tales and tropes of family. Figures who could so easily flit like phantoms in her well honed poetry are palpably enjoying an after-life in the poet's ability to redeem through deep understanding. The collection arcs from, at one extreme, the parsimonies of the household, to the transcending delights of the natural world. These poems undo any doubts about the poetic power of the domestic muse.' Kris Hemensley';From a gathered childhood of rabbits and pumpkin, firewood and lamb chops all the marks of dailiness remembered these evocative lyrics move on into adult variegation: into losses, change and travel. Everywhere they are fuelled by the poet's visual acuity.' Chris Wallace-Crabbe';This substantial collection confirms the skills that Chrystie has demon-strated in individual poems previously published: illuminating description and tough exploration of ordinary human experience, and the ability to move, with apparent ease, into its mythic possibilities.' Aileen Kelly

I dont take photographs. Or paint. Instead I use words as my medium my way of capturing what I see and turning it into something meaningful. My hope is that the reader too will be able to see what I have seen, feel what I have felt. This is of course the essence of communication.