Books published by Puncher and Wattmann

Why is dress so much more than draping ourselves with the nearest piece of material we can find? And why does being dressed change us into creatures that seem so separate from the rest of nature? Being Prepared explores several ways these transformations take place and what their significance might be for our sense of being human. From Superman's costume to the hats of Edwardian women. From the role ornament plays in dress to the furs worn by Stone Age people are just some of the forms of dress explored in Being Prepared."Carter's arguments in this stimulating book, illuminated by references to art and dress history, literature and philosophy, can be unsettling: in adorning ourselves, are we clearing away something that is obscuring our ideal condition, or are we transforming a fundamentally chaotic entity into formal perfection? With its mixture of erudition and wit, Being Prepared is a rare and hugely enjoyable treat." - Clair Hughes, author of Dressed in Fiction"Being Prepared is overflowing with discussions rich in a wide swewep of intellectual and literary sources, including Freud, Simmel, Carlyle and Marcuse (on how we transform ourselves into immaterial states via dress and then how it can all come apart in an unravelling, both physical and conceptual). Carter remains one of the most sophisticated, witty and original writers on fashion, dress and clothing." - Toby Slade, author of Japanese Fashion: a Cultural History, University of TokyoMichael Carter is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Art History and Film Studies, The University of Sydney. He is the author of Fashion Classics From Carlyle to Barthes and, with Andy Stafford, is a co-editor of the Roland Barthes' anthology, The Language of Fashion.

A small black cat wakes in the box in which it was carried to a dump and makes its way home through the drains. The only change in the divine realm is that there is no longer anyone or anything guarding the gates of the dead. - 'Downpayment on a Catastrophe'The simplest of places that at every moment confronts with fresh ambiguities: 'The world's yard': is it a tree-lined garden where children are playing? or the yard where a yardarm is erected, the executioner's noose always dangling? or the boneyard where heretic and believer lie side by side to whisper their shared confidences? 'Carnivorous laughter filters through the woods.' Isn't it always so?'It's not uncommon to know one has fallen through a trapdoor. Cronin is one of those rare writers who understands that, beyond the trapdoor, we are stranded with God at the endermost end of the world.' - Elena Navronskaya Blanco'There are many ways to smuggle explosives into a poem. To construct a space at the back of the world's yard, to sit there calmly among the flowerbeds while God wanders absent-mindedly in and out - could there be a better way to conceal the dynamite of beauty, the gelignite of unexpected openings of truth?' - Ricardo Xavier Bousoño'Lashings of beauty, lashings of perplexity. My standard cynicism finds no standing place. I surrender to the miracle of Cronin's poetry.' - Lazlo Thalassa

Ouyang Yu has been one of Australia's most prolific producers of poetry, translations and edited collections for the last three decades. He has also been nominated, in April 2019, as one of the top ten poets for 2018 in China as a xianfeng shiren (avant-garde poet) because he has been writing poetry that defies publication all along, in both China and Australia, in both Chinese and English. This collection gathers much of this experimental work, with some of the poems collected in this book dating as far back as late 1982.Ouyang Yu is still alive, and writing. This is his most posthum(or)ous work.

On Low Ground, Lower GroundI have been looking at the low ground the lowest ground, ever the low ground under the city the buildings and the smoke from the kitchen chimneys seeking a residence on low groundI have been looking at the low ground the lowest ground, ever the low ground under the sunlight the soil and the seeds seeking fruit on low ground...Long Quan, born in the 1960s, is a Chinese poet based in Jiangxi, China, whose poems, translated by Ouyang Yu, have been published in Westerly, The Age, and Landfall (New Zealand), The Sons of Camus Writers International Journal (Canada), and also included in Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China (2013), translated by Ouyang Yu and published by Five Islands Press in Melbourne, Australia. As a member of the Chinese Writers Association, he has published four collections of poetry.

On a Certain Afternoonon a certain afternoon I, on a sudden, actually smelt something like a rat from the fifth collection of poetry by a poet I had been passionately in love withon a certain afternoon a mass poetry magazine, just bought was ripped to pieces by me and a newspaper, known to all, that had just arrived was carried by me to the toilet...Yang Xie, born in 1972 in Wenling, Zhejiang, China, is an award-winning poet whose poems have been published in China, Australia, America and Vietnam, a number of them, translated by Ouyang, in the Age, Kenyon Review and Indiana Review, a few years ago. A most recent collectoin of poetry, Poems of Yi Sha, Shu Cia and Yang Xie, translated by Outang Yu, was published in 2013 by Vagabond Press in Sydney, Australia. Yang Xie's collection of short stories, titled, dao jinmao dasha qu (Going to the Prosperous and Golden Building), written in Chinese, was published by Kaiming Publishing House in 2013 in China. This collection contains 69 poems by him.

Three Yearsthe land, extending itself, makes one turn after another, spitting village after village, till it gives its cold light to the gaping grave.I, a blunt knife, hammered on an anvil have been hardened-for three years three years! Till a miracle happens- will I be able to return from it?Born in 1965, in Fenghua, Zhejiang, Shu Cai was originally Chen Shucai. He graduated with a BA in French literature from the Department of French Language and Literature, Beijing Foreign Languages University in 1987. From 1990 to 1994 he worked as a diplomat in the Chinese Embassy in Senegal and has since been working as a research fellow in Foreign Literature Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He won the Medal of Academic Palm Knight in France in 2008. His publications include such collections of poetry as Solitaire (China, 1997), and Short Poems by Shu Cai (Hong Kong, 2004) and his translations of French literature include A Selection of Poems by Pierre Reverdy (China, 2002), Selected Poems by Rene Char (China, 2002), and Selected Poems by Nine French Poets (Shanghai, 2009). In July 2012, Shu Cai was invited to attend the Winter Translation School by Monash University in Melbourne.

Perhaps I am Willingperhaps I am willing to be with you every day raising ducks. my heart, for the rest of my life is a window pane cleaned till it shines. early in the morning we go somewhere near to the simple-minded creek the sun spreading our skins with a deep glaze and the healthy grass reaching over our knees...Born in December 1969, Lu Ye is a Chinese poet. She did her B.A. and M.A. at Shandong University and is now teaching at the University of Jinan, China. She has won a number of poetry awards, including the National Award for the Young Poets by Poetry Monthly (2005), the People's Literature Award (2011) and the Distinguished Achievement Award by Poetry Exploration (2016). She has also been elected one of "the Top 10 Best Young Women Poets of the New Century", awarded by Poetry Monthly, the Chinese Writers Association (2006). She was the poet-in-residence in Capital Normal University, Beijing, China (2005), the poet-in-residence of the KHN Center for the Arts in NE, USA (2008), and a visiting poet and scholar in Creighton Univesity, Omaha, NE, USA (2006 and 2016 respectively). To date, she has published a number of poetry collections and novels in China.

"Duncan Hose treads the lesser-known path of maverick Australian poets such as Norman Talbot, John Watson and Javant Biarujia-that is, like all good must-read poets, he invents a new language, full of playful disguises and serious intent, reaffirming Baudelaire's view that only the human-made is beautiful." - Gig RyanDuncan Hose is from the softslang line of the chansonnier, whose reference points range between Trefoil Island, Melbourne and Coney Island. He is the author of Rathaus and One Under Bacchus.

A Crooked Stile takes a slantwise leap over the everyday, a fencer's delight in parry and parody. Starting out from an almost out-of-body consideration of being, Jenkins blithely waltzes around the globe, your better-than-Baedeker witty tour guide. At home, she wades into symbolic systems, taking on water, punctuation. zero, family and mortality before briefly tilting her dunce's cap at the sun, as it sinks into the west.Carol Jenkins lives in Sydney. Her two collections of poetry Fishing in the Devonian (2008) and Xn (2013) were both shortlisted for Premier's Awards. Her illustrated novel, Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series (2013) is a comic tour de force.

When David was a kid, he thought he knew everything - especially about his pesky and annoying siblings who kept popping up out of nowhere. But on the same night in 1980 David's two brothers ran away, severely beaten. Years later David goes in search of them and in the process learns things about himself. State of Origin is a heart-warming and harrowing story about what happens when the Stolen Generation, Ava Gardner, the Russian Royal Family and evil step-fathers converge in the creation of identity. It's an exploration of what parts of a shared childhood continue to bond long after a family has been blown apart.'Kelly's voice is the kind you want to sit down with and soak up and carry with you through life. His writing balances brilliantly between pathos and humour and moves through some of the most fraught, complex and compelling intersections of the current cultural landscape with a stunningly effective lightness of touch. The book is a delight. It is harrowing. It is haunting. It is the sort that will make you laugh out loud one moment and move you beyond words the next. It is the most powerful memoir I have read in years.' - Michael Sala

Like its precursor Barnacle Rock, Brief Garden is a collection of poems largely concerned with environmental degeneration and loss. The title poem deals with the ephemeral nature of a civilisation and its artefacts, but the focus of the collection goes deeper, playing on the word "brief", the vanishing of an Edenic garden. Today, our world is further threatened by anthropogenic climate change, oil-mining assaults on natural wonders, flora and fauna, and by continued government intervention into the preservation of heritage buildings and sites. The land tended by Australia's first inhabitants for 60,000 years is now under siege. In these beautifully crafted and researched poems, voices from the past and present remind readers of what has been taken away.Comments on Bradstock's Barnacle Rock (P&W, 2013) "Barnacle Rock displays a keen eye for the visceral context of some groundbreaking history, embracing the discovery and exploration of Australia... I like these poems; they're fluently inventive and elegantly paced." - Ian McFarlane, The Australian"Thematically, it identifies important and topical issues... Margaret Bradstock fulfils the mission of the evangelising poet - to seize and hold the attention of the reader, to fascinate and enlighten, and to address spiritual hunger in a satisfying way." - John Upton, Mascara Literary Review"Dense, a rich read, it alerts the mind into awareness... This is a far-reaching book, its craft tight and its scope challenging. Barnacle Rock finishes in heavy territory, but its right to this is well-earned." - Robyn Rowland, Cordite Poetry ReviewMargaret Bradstock is a Sydney poet, critic and editor. She lectured ad UNSW and has been Asialink weiter-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Her poetry is widely published and has won awards, including the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for The Pomelo Tree and the Woollahra Festival Award for Barnacle Rock.

'These poems explore the horrors and effects of war with fierce, unrelenting attention. The poetry is precise in its details and has a dignity and clarity that is hard-won. Winifred Weir can delineate feelings and perceptions with a subtle hand. Each tightly drawn line carries us into elegy, tragedy and loss with a brave, surefooted intensity. These poems are as genuine and moving as anything in contemporary poetry.' - Judith Beveridge'Win Weir's Walking on Ashes creates the story of an Australian family affected by two world wars. Weir's father, as a single young man with a promising athletic career, enlisted to fight in the First World War and lived through the horrors of the Gallipoli landing and the trench warfare in Flanders. Alcoholic, his future athletic plans ruined, hostile to his daughter and at times to his wife; difficult, angry and haunted by what he has seen, the father of Walking on Ashes is the focal point around whom the voices and lives of wife, son and daughter evolve and devolve, attempting to understand their estrangement from a war-survivor dad. It is a poetry that sues for understanding of what has happened to those who have fought in war; how men are changed by war; and how their traumas and sufferings affect the lives of daughters, sons, mothers and brothers, and the children of generations to come.' - J S Harry'These lucid, poignant re-creations, of war and unpeaceful peace, testify that, for some survivors, the worst battleground is the mind.' - Kerry LevesWinifred Weir has been published in a collection of four poets, Contours, and her poetic narrative, or verse novella, Isabella, was awarded the Wome Writers' Poetry Book Award in 2003. In 1996 she won the Women Writers' Poetry Prize. She has worked as a teacher and currently lives in Sydney's north.

These poems are unflinching in the face of death, yet filled with the delights of living, from a potato harvest to a walk beside a river. They are in tune with the complexities of the modern world - the unseen environmental impact of war, an apocalyptic vision of a flooded city, a shocking glimpse of school bullying, the heartbreaking dreams of refugees. An extended sequence, set during the Vietnam war, dramatises the confronting nature of combat and the way it comes back to haunt you, night after sleepless night. Finally, a fascination with the creativity of painters builds to the blazing farewell of an unknown artist.

After a stint as a music venue proprietor, Geoff Maddox is getting on with his life: managing his complex domestic situation; visiting the local shopping mall; and socialising with the regulars at the Stella Maris Hotel. This routine is disrupted by a fateful encounter with a young dancer, Amber, and the reappearance of an unsavoury character from his past. His life is rerouted into an undisciplined quest to fulfil his desire and prove himself. Maddox is a fast-paced, blackly comic ride around the inner workings of a man with time on his hands.Chris Abrahams was born in Oamaru, New Zealand but grew up in Sydney, Australia. For most of his adult life he has been a musician working in the fields of improvised music and electronica, touring internationally, producing and co-producing over 50 albums, and winning two Aria awards.Maddox is his first novel.

The Clambake is the annual culmination of a new poetry project in Newcastle, NSW - 'Cuplet Poetry Night'. Founded by Claire Albrecht in August 2018, the monthly event hosts poets from across Australia and the world.The poems in this anthology cover vast territories of content, form and style. Introducing the reader to the state of contemporary poetry in Australia and abroad, this book offers its own small but valuable addition to the art form. The works are representative of the quality and diversity of poetry that audiences have experienced at the monthly poetry night in its first year, and promise great things to come.Featuring: Michelle Cahill, Toby Fitch, Keri Glastonbury, A.J. Carruthers, David Musgrave, Amelia Dale, Emily Stewart, Holly Isemonger, Ed Wright, Anupama Pilbrow, Gareth Jenkins, Tricia Dearborn, Jonno Revanche, Šime Kne¿evi¿, Daniel Swain, Gareth Jenkins, Janette Hoppe, Juan Ruben Reyes, Benjamin Dodds, Christopher Brown and Tim Tomlinson.

To the vanishing point where light will expand/where light wants the eye to go ("Towards Light")Light, as a physical and metaphorical entity recurs in many of the poems in this new collection by Sarah Day. Light makes its presence felt in these poems as a source of illumination and grace, it is also the means by which the flaws and discrepanies of the present and past are highlighted."Sarah Day is a poet of wonderful attentiveness. She notices everything, persuading us, as readers, that she has seen and heard the living world truly. Wherever she stands, she gives lyrical utterance in Towards Light to our fresh, daily life, vibrant in its perpetuity." - Christopher Wallace-Crabbe"Exquisitely nuanced, vivid and brilliant, Towards Light observes the natural world with grace and artistry and generously offers to her readers the gift of rapture." - Janine BurkeOf her previous work Tempo: "It is the transfusing of emotion that transforms these poems from observations, in both senses, to genuinely affecting and memorable art... Tempo is a wonderful book." - Stephen Edgar

David Musgrave's seventh collection of poems is a kind of clearing: poems which open up, sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully, what it is to be in the world. From obliquely confessional poems concerned with the death of his mother and the unexpected endings of significant relationships, to celebrations of new lives, this collection encompasses a wide range of emotions, attitudes, forms and styles. The poems show a significant sharpening from earlier work and increasingly move in the direction of uncompromising honesty. Numb and Number is an elegantly powerful collection by a significant poet who is entering a new and interesting phase of his career.I'm clearing a space in Waratah. Here, in Waratah, I'm making a clearing, marking out space among bluetongues, grevilleas, a conurbation of ants' nests. I'm making a space the size of a mid-range imagination, a modest keep, a distillation of hope. I'm chucking out, I'm ringing in, and I'm wiping clean.- "Waratah"David Musgrave's most recent collection, Anatomy of Voice, was awarded the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry. He is also the recipient of the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for his collection Phantom Limb, and individual poems have been awarded many prizes. His novel Glissando was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction in 2011. In 2005 he founded the publishing house Puncher & Wattmann. He lives in Newcastle with his family.

This is an important and timely book from a mature, perspicacious voice. Phyllis Perlstone shows us a Monash behind the image on the $100 bank note: the engineer, innovator, man-about-town, husband, father, warrior, tactician; his love affairs and vanities; the prejudice he encounters and regards as 'strange dislike'. Monash's life and Australia's times start up from within the lines of poetry, dealing with brilliant but conflicted events and ideals. The poems move back and forth in time to regard the past and its values with a present perspective.Perlstone's impartial authorial eye and her distinctive sprung language makes this work of culture, history and biography fresh, complex and meaningful. A triumph of a book: singularly light of touch, concrete in its descriptions and a humane treatise on ambition, xenophobia, modern engineering and the new warfare.- Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

Gravity as a physical influence, the weight of gravity, and gravity of thought and action are central to Andrew Sant's new collection of poems - and so too is the means of baffling gravity, not the least by the deployment of wit. Gravity here is also baffling in the alternative sense, as a force or as a theory, which summons perplexity. These poems, wide-ranging in time and place, are richly textured investigations of the world, its terrain and its people, by an alert, often restless, informed observer.From reviews of Andrew Sant's previous collection The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems:...entertaining and effectively idiosyncratic. - Sydney Morning HeraldOne of Sant's great gifts is his ability to wed naturalness with thematic abstraction... This is poetry for lending, sharing, travelling - this collection wants to move. - Cordite...a refined and most enjoyable collection. - WesterlyAndrew Sant's new collection is seriously good... In a book crammed with excellent poems it's difficult to point to any without feeling others deserve equal attention. - Critical Survey

'To End All Wars' was a phrase applied hopefully during 'The Great War'. Its various permutations were meant to suggest that this one might be the last war of all. How quickly the phrase became ironic. How many wars have followed! The words 'to end all wars' must remind us today that all armed conflict is a vast social catastrophe. The centenary of the World War I Armistice comes with a barely veiled triumphalism in the countries that were victorious one hundred years ago. It was that triumphalism, and the failed peace that followed it, which led onto new catastrophes in World War II and then the Cold War. Now, well into the twenty first century, with ever uglier nationalisms raising their heads everywhere, it is time to critically examine the Armistice of one hundred years ago, and its meaning for Australia and for the world, then and now.In this collection, the reader will find work from some of Australasia's leading poets alongside perspectives from new voices. This is a diverse and unsettling read.

In his sixth book, Greg McLaren finds his stories in those of others, and others' in his. These poems seek, suspect and deepen connection; they nod, wink, and pay, in nearly equal parts, homage and fromage. While Windfall includes responses and asides to, and satires of, contemporary writers, it also sees McLaren further exploring his interest in classical Chinese poetry. He takes these poets for a drive through new contexts, reimagining their poems eking out connection across culture, history, experience and space into a voice that is shared and his own.'This is a refinement of McLaren's poetic signatures - avian life, creative palimpsest and homage, the mythic melancholy of the Hunter Region and Sydney's inner west, laconic absurdity - to a new level. There is mastery in his fringing of gothic moods with dry humour, and his ability to go to the edge of self-questioning but always return with some awkward blossom or shiny bottletop.' - Bonny Cassidy

The backdrop of Carol and Ahoy is the Goulburn River and its floodplains around Shepparton. Ancestry and watchful reflection combine seamlessly in these poems, which are always in search of "what is tactile and particular", be it a gum tree, an agave or the past. Simon West's fluid, ever-shifting gaze will be familiar to readers of his previous volumes.Waking on a Summer MorningI asked if verse were no more than a toy, then heard the blackbirds carol and ahoy and the traffic's tidal snare drum sough. They were absolute, these tones, not thought's forgotten setting now, as they washed through open windows and the new-found arch of door jambs, and echoed round the room's old school of shadows. They were glory of music on the mind's cool parquet floor. Simon West is the author of three collections of poetry and an edition of the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. He is represented in anthologies including Thirty Australian Poets, Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, and Contemporary Australian Poetry.

This first full-length volume draws from poems written over roughly ten years: prose sequences, sonnets or thereabouts, parody-homages, a metro poem, psychical collaborations, and drawn from small-print chapbooks. Combining a condensed lyricism, collage, and durational procedures, the collection works its way through days and the everyday (near accidents, a working salad, the assumptions of architecture)...The sense of fleeting glimpse, of provisionality, of actual sense-data taken in but not yet possessed, is terrific. Is it 'lyric'? Well, yes-but with a stylistic affiliation to Projective and subsequent aesthetics. And no-in the sense that Wright does not seek that laurel or that identification.The feeling given is of a spacey self-awareness. So many lines in these poems seem acts of orientation, verification of the subject's placement, vis-a-vis sounds, views, examinations-of the sky, of overhead wires, a bird, sounds of a nearby train or traffic, changes in the weather. A space both actual and mental.Ken Bolton, SoutherlyTim Wright is the author of The night's live changes (2014) and Weekend's end (2013).

This book is aimed at providing criticism on contemporary Australian poetry in a form that is accessible to general readers. It is intended to be the first in a series which will grapple with the bewildering diversity of the contemporary poetry scene. Australian poetry deserves a criticism that accompanies the astonishing momentum and luminosity that has developed, which both elucidates the scale of poetic achievement and is also not afraid to evaluate that achievement through a rigorous and disinterested critical lens. Australian poets have been feeding the ghost with extraordinary energy and acumen over the last quarter of a century; it is now time for Australian poetry criticism to catch up.Andy Kissane has published a novel, a book of short stories, The Swarm, (2012) and four books of poetry. Radiance (2014) was shortlisted for the Victorian and Western Australian Premier's Prizes for Poetry and the Adelaide Festival Awards. His essay on the Indigenous poet, Dennis McDermott was the winner of the inaugural BTG - Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing Prize.David Musgrave teaches English and Writing at the University of Newcastle. He was a co-editor (with Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge and Judy Johnson) of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016). He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Anatomy of Voice (2016) which was awarded the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry.Carolyn Rickett is an Assistant Dean (Research), Senior Lecturer in Communication and creative arts practitioner at Avondale College of Higher Education. Her research and teaching interests focus on: trauma and bereavement studies; writing as therapeutic intervention; memoir and autobiographical writing; medical humanities; journalism ethics and praxis; literary and poetry studies; chaplaincy, and the psychosocial and spiritual care of patients.

I'd love to offer a tightly-themed book, but this is not it - it touches on many concerns and interests. The times demand it and so do people encountered, things seen and felt. These are poems from nearly thirty years. - Judith RodriguezJudith has an amazing voice and writes poems that make you feel something. That's why I love her poetry. - Vanessa Page in Facebook, 2015After reading Flares I popped it in my bag and carried it with me so I could open it at any time (and I have) and revisit its thoughts and ideas. It's a wonderful companion. - Teresa Cannon, 2016

Superette's speaker assumes the guise of an audacious flaneuse with a practiced eye for detail. A combination of Dorothy Parker wit, burlesque, and punk, this citizen stylist observes urban life anew. The collection pulsates with sneaky beats and sharp observations of latent and not-so-latent fantasies. Her poems swell with lunch-hour humidity, re-envisioning our everyday routines and small intimacies. be prepared to surrender to Superette's artful turns and city pockets, as Bufton leads us through a contemporary expanse with effortless flair.Melinda Bufton is a Melbourne-based poet. Her debut collection Girlery (2014) was hailed by Emily Bitto as "both political and sassy in its challenge to poetic doctrine." A leading voice of third-wave feminism, Melinda's work has appeared in Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016) and Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016).

Mothers-in-law are famous for being difficult but when Nell marries Andy it's her father-in-law, Hal, who is the problem. A corrosive force in his own family, Hal is a truly ugly Australian who spreads his corruption whenever he gets the chance. Surviving Hal takes place in Sydney and Thailand and is the story of Nell and Andy trying to keep their family together against the influence of a charismatic but ugly soul.Praise for Penny Flanagan: "Poignant ... balanced, delicately handled, quietly eloquent." - The Sydney Morning Herald"Penny Flanagan has produced a stylish first novel studded with comic gems." - New Librarian"Not since Helen Garner's Monkey Grip has a book given me this feeling of fitting into another woman's skin." - Marie Low

The beautiful are not exempt from the need to be brave. But we treat them as if they are: it is how we destroy them.We find relief in sport precisely because it has no meaning: its drama is expressed in numbers, and numbers contain no moral burden.Interiority withdraws the body from the moment like a first step towards sorrow.Like many poets, Martin Langford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The neat snakes collected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way of articulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they nevertheless retain the poem's elegance, and its characteristic tension between emotion and idea. Neat Snakes is a very different addition to Australian writing.Martin Langford has published seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are The Human Project: New and Selected Poems (P&W, 2009), and Ground (P&W, 2015). He is co-editor (with J. Beveridge, J. Johnson and D. Musgrave) of Contemporary Australian Poetry (P&W, 2016), and editor of Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788-2008 (P&W, 2009). An essayist and critic, he is the poetry reviewer for Meanjin. His work has been translated into French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish and Arabic."one of Australia's foremost poets. . . a truly visioniary poet" - Andy Kissane"...equal to anything now being written in Australia" - Brian Purcell, Five Bells"Langford does not resort to obscurity to keep a poem afloat; the juxtapositions and word plays are stunning adornments to clear communication... Ground is a major contribution to the continued development of an Australian postcolonial poetics." - Philip Hall, Verity La

Monasteries and gaols: David Foster reflects that during the course of his life the monasteries have emptied while the gaols are doing nicely. Set in Goulburn and its surrounds, where Foster resides, The Contemptuary is a lament for a dying faith, a commentary on prison life and, perhaps unexpectedly from Foster in this, his sixteenth novel, an unputdownable whodunnit.'Attempt to characterise Foster's writing and eventually one will run out of adjectives. There is simply no one remotely like him in contemporary Australian fiction. He is so far ahead of everyone else that it's not funny.' - Australian Book Review