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'Pam Schindler's say, a river proves the best poems don't have to shout. There is so much light in the brushstrokes of this painterly collection, in which Schindler washes private moments of grief and intimacy onto nature's liminal spaces. These are compact poems "spinning into [their] own weather"; they are "thin moon[s] cradling the dark".' - Zenobia Frost'Here's a poet who is one of Australia's recording angels of the natural world, whose pen's an artist's brush, whose poems "cut words on the clear air" with the arrow-sure, effortless grace that comes only from mature craftsmanship. Her themes paint dimensions of love and loss on a frail canvas made new from lissom, nimble, honey-sharp words. We breathe in this beauty aware that underneath is a leonine strength and a bright deep knowing.' - Anne Kellas'This softly-spoken collection shares the poet's contemplation of presence and absence. The reader is drawn close to poems that invite a reflective mind. Their power comes from the affectionate distillation of small details of the natural world and the deeply-felt experience of human relationships, love and loss, into direct and unselfconscious language. Having engaged her reader, Schindler steps aside and lets the words work their magic.' - Ynes Sanz

This short novel is both a love story, and a story about life and death, age and youth, and innocence and experience. Peter Allthorpe, at the age of sixty-seven, is confronted with the likelihood of his imminent death from terminal cancer. As he copes with this reality and its medical treatment, and his own place in 'the scheme of things', he searches for what he calls 'a lucid life' and a 'quiet completeness', one he ultimately finds through his loving family.

A well-known quote from the master of minimal storytelling, Raymond Carver, is 'Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.' In this book of flash fiction and short poems, Ray Liversidge invites you to do just that. However, Liversidge's writing often asks that you read between the lines and hints at what is unsaid. So, after finishing all ...of a sudden, you might find it worth your while to return to it and delight in allusions you may have overlooked.

In the preface, Maurice Whelan writes, 'It is one thing to get started as a writer. It is another to sustain a creative writing life. I select a few poets who have written about how they established, defined, and sustained themselves. There is an exploration of the relationship between dreams and poetry, of language and the benefits of knowing the way language has shaped who we are and how a love of words is essential if you are to become a poet.' There are many parts in this short book. In one, poems written during the Covid 19 outbreak offer a literary diary of life during the pandemic. As the world was turned upside down, Maurice Whelan responded to that upside down-ness by writing poetry. Poetry speaks to the author and the author speaks to us about the essence of what it is to be human. His belief in its revelatory and restorative powers inform every page. His is a poetry of life, a search for beauty, a declaration of rights, the right to an imaginative inner world, the right to an outer world founded on truth, liberty and justice.

'This book is a love affair between the poet and the English language, with flirting, passion and yes, even a tiff or two, but each giving as good as the other, all with quirkiness and humour. Dig in, ruminate on Mike's take on the world; it might just change yours. Love it.' - David Cookson'Mike's poetry flirts with the impossible and the deeply carnivorous which appeals long after the reading.' - Geoffrey Aitken'Water on the Moon is an adventure through the poetic musings of a clever and diverse wordsmith. With verve and authenticity, Mike explores the everyday, the whimsical and the spiritual trajectories of the human race - and he is not afraid to venture into the dark side. This poetry collection shines with beams of hope and humour.' - Jude Aquilina

Funny, sad, nostalgic and reflective, this is a collection of twenty-one short stories. They are stories of simpler and more carefree days. Days of sunshine and freedom. Watermelon days.

Reimmersion is the second poetry collection from Canberra poet Tony Steven Williams. Within its pages, the reader will find an eclectic assemblage of poems paying particular emphasis to the human condition and our environment with some science fiction, fantasy and fun thrown in to lighten up the mood. Sadness and joy, romance and hostility, ignorance and care, survival and denial, they're all here, narrated with the skill of a poet who is also a short fiction writer, who loves to tell stories, who paints with words. Tony's recent passion for Japanese poetry styles complements and weaves through the free verse, song-like, twisting with imagery and sideways allusions. This is, indeed, a book for immersion and reimmersion.

What better way for a family to start the trip of a lifetime to Europe than the magic of Disneyland? Tales of dark deeds shiver at the Tower of London. The excitement at Hamleys toys gives way to a campervan odyssey. Think Dover Castle and Roman ruins. Friends from every country play with Neville and Clara's children, language differences not a problem. All too soon, Clara's life twists from love, to loss and grief. An advanced Alliance Française French class helps her brave the lows of widowhood with a new man, Antoine. At Montpellier, France, Marcel Odier guides them on a cobblestone walk through a medieval village. His daughter, Solenne, is strangely silent - a puzzle to Antoine, given the teenager's usual vivacity. Cholet offers a sound and light spectacular. Horses in caparisons, a castle in flames and a merry-go-round spinning on a lake. Florence brings a fifteenth century football match with colourful costumes, a game the likes of which they'd never seen before... An incomprehensible tragedy lurks in the wings. 'There are moments in a life that hold profound meaning. Like the silence between music notes, they are felt but cannot be held. Decima Wraxall writes of these moments with that lightness of being that has the universality to touch the human heart. This is a travel memoir with a difference. A rewarding and uplifting read.' - Colleen Keating

Remembering Richard is a collection of stories about the unease which lies just below the surface of life. A boy sets out to swim across a lake, only to discover its bottom is covered with treacherous, muddy-looking weed, which seems to grasp at him, seeking to drag him under... A family falls apart as the beloved creek at the bottom of their garden is destroyed by a combination of industrial pollution and local council works. People disappear without explanation, the dead revisit the living. the boundaries of reality and sanity are tested. But there is hope, too. One brother looks after another when the latter has fallen on hard times and despaired. And a middle-aged accountant who has lost everything rediscovers confidence and a sense of purpose from a strange encounter with an artist's wife. By turns sad, funny, mysterious and haunting, these stories will move, amuse, puzzle and ultimately challenge the reader, remaining in the mind long after the book is finished.

This book is written for concerned people whose busy lives allow little access to the natural world. It invites readers to gain more awareness of the wonder and beauty of some of our fellow creatures now vulnerable or threatened, and of our actual dependence on them. Suggested are ways in which we can all, both individually and collectively, engage with nature wherever we are.'A relatable, educational and captivating book. We are grateful for Sue's contribution towards conservation.' - Australian Wildlife Conservancy'This small book is accessible to all. It is a valuable contribution to raising awareness of the plight of our threatened marine life and the important work conservation groups do.' - Australian Marine Conservation Society

Over the centuries, philosophers, artists, writers and musicians have conveyed the therapeutic value and beauty of the world around us. In his beautiful 'On the Grasshopper and Cricket', John Keats claims, 'The poetry of earth is never dead.' The harsh beauty of our desert landscape is captured by Douglas Stewart. In 'The Fierce Land', he says, 'Here the world ends in a shield of purple stone / Naked in its long war against the sun.' Wordsworth, though a lover of nature, also appreciated the early morning awakening of a large city. But our modern world is haunted by conflicts and uncertainties. It can be difficult to grasp and appreciate positive experiences and their therapeutic possibilities. All meetings and encounters become memories. And, unless we nurture those beautiful, meaningful encounters, they will erode like footprints in sand.

'Written against the background of pandemic isolation, Robyn's elegant, diverse and spare book immediately captures the reader's attention with its deeply felt individual observations of nature and human experience, expertly crafted in poetic forms and prose that prompt reflection and the joy of rereading.' - Janet Howie

'If each life is a world, what is a world of billions of lives? Sweeping through evolutionary time, through the passage of ages, Rosanna Licari's Earlier looks back, applies its forensic gaze to an insistent, pervasive history of births and creations, human and other. Weaving threads and connections, Licari's poems investigate rich and diverse beginnings, awakenings, and endings too, celebrating lush, thriving, irrepressible life, both individual and collective. Thoughtful, curious, broad ranging, at times wondering, at times biographical, Earlier is an archaeology of poems to unearth and relish.' - David Adès, poet, host of Poets' Corner podcast series'Rosanna Licari's collection Earlier is an elegant feast that pulses and throbs with vivid life. Perhaps the most powerful theme of the collection is that of hope, of survival and continuance in the face of uncontrollable forces, their scouring, purging power leaving their survivors naked as they step from burning rubble into the unknown future, bearing a seed of continuance and new life. Earlier's eloquent and discerning lyrical narratives are poems for now, with their wisdom and stoicism, their calm beauty in the eye of today's calamitous uncertainty.' - Melissa Ashley, author of The Birdman's Wife and The Bee and the Orange Tree'Rosanna Licari's Earlier is a "bristling corpus" of extraordinary poetry, deeply rooted in intersectional environmentalism. There are blessings, valedictions and "molten metal-laced" poems of witness, devastation and ardour in this collection, exploring in diverse ways metaphysics, metamorphosis, evolution, new histories and ekphrasis. Superb, intimate and breathtaking in their expression of an ecopoetic community, Earlier is a wonderland of poems, where "The seed forms and anticipates / the unfurling dance / of germination."' - Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University'What an ambitious work Rosanna Licari has crafted - nothing less than a measure of evolution and history, her own book of Genesis and the life thereafter. Her poetry is erudite, precise in its turns of phrase, and always, in all ways, like the great storytellers of old.' - Felix Cheong, Singapore's National Arts Council Young Artist winner'Rosanna Licari's poetry is as fecund as the natural world she often writes about. This is engaging and masterful work replete with a love of art and the natural world. Her landscapes are ancient and modern and her work is full of metaphysical possibilities while she also glories in the joy of the more prosaic activities such as doing laps in a swimming pool mind you even that has a transcendental dimension.' - Phil Brown, Arts Editor, The Courier Mail

Jacky, in the title story of this collection, is a young descendant of pioneers and is curious about her ancestors. Jacky returns to her home town and is fascinated by the mix of characters who have settled there who are outsiders, like herself and like her ancestors so long ago who were uprooted from Scotland. It is inspired by the author's own ancestral quest. The other stories are fictionalised from a mix of dramatic stories told to the author, such as 'The Spanish Wedding', about a lovers' triangle. The story 'Who Wants To Be a Millionaire' is about a struggling, divorced mother who inherits what turns out to be a maelstrom of wealth that brings out the evil in people around her. 'Goodbye to Doll's Houses' is about sinister drug networks in social welfare housing that ensnare vulnerable young women. 'The Immigrants', based on a true story, is about the deadly threats immigrants, such as Irish Rosen in the story, may experience. The final three stories are true, as told to the author, such as 'Anna's Escape From Europe' about her harrowing experiences during World War II. 'The Jar in the Chimney' is Adriana K. Wood's mother's story about running away, as a poor, teenaged orphan, from Belfast, Ireland, to New Zealand.

'James Walton handles words like a jeweller handles a blue diamond. In each of his books, we are transported into a linguistic heaven. Snail Mail Cursive is no exception; an eloquent, gorgeous collection, in which one is invited into a private world made universal. Whether the subject is life, death, authors, songwriters, landscape or animals, he finds the cutting edge of a reflective language, burrowing deep within our shared and singular experience, enclosing us and reaching for more, within and out of his meticulous, inimitable prism.' - John Maxwell O'Brien

'Alex Hand makes the ordinary extraordinary in his latest collection penned during the pandemic. He says himself in "Self-portrait", "I find beauty in polished floorboards, and in our Brown Betty teapot." With an unusual abundance of time in lockdown, who hasn't found themself back in childhood with seemingly infinite time to contemplate a world now shrunk to the backyard and life's past chapters? An ache of time to contemplate the world's current quandary and seek answers from far-off times, with "Wristwatch hours disenthroned". Hand is as attuned to nature as a Stradivarius under the fingers of Maxim Vengerov. The startling simplicity yet profundity of his descriptions of the everyday are often very moving, igniting dismay at what we've lost, and what we could still have. Friends, neighbours and family come alive, some from Hand's early life in England like "Mr Riley...in flat cap and bicycle clips". I'm buoyed by Alex Hand's unfailingly optimistic spirit and love and gratitude for this life with all its unpredictable dissonances. As he puts it, the pandemic has wrought "the reseeding of community". Would that it would it endure. There's so much music in what we thought was the mundane.' - Mairi Nicolson, ABC Classic presenter

'Of course Whale-shocked is about whales, the shocking history of whaling, and our changing attitudes to it. Written as a remarkable long-form poem, Sue Aldred uses her own family history from the 1800s when her ancestor sailed on the killer boats, at a time when whales were seen only as a resource, there for the plunder, through to the current century where she and her family support whale conservationists, understanding whales as awesome intelligent creatures with much to teach us. This is an important work. The historical detail is as fascinating as the poetry is powerful, and for once has a happier-than-most ending.' - Karen Throssell

Many of Schubert's six hundred songs were composed quickly, and often in the midst of of a gathering of friends loudly revelling or performing other music. Sometimes that remarkable facility would be exercised while walking in company through the woods round Vienna. John Watson has composed a sequence of scenes from this prodigious working life - sometimes in Schubert's own voice, sometimes in the voices of critics or friends. Here are glimpses - forming a song cycle, as it were - depicting Schubert at work or between songs, until the final fortnight's struggle when he leaves them behind.

'Never read a verse novel? Here's a beauty. The world Helen Swain creates rings true from the very first page, as she explores the complexities of a carer's life with brevity, honesty, and wry wit. Helen brilliantly evokes the tensions between an ageing mother and a daughter who wants to care for her When the time comes. This book is an act of profound respect for carers and their hard-won knowledge and experience. You won't want to put it down, even if your tea's getting cold and the dog's whining for a walk.' - Dr Gina Mercer, poet and editor'Elegiac and devastating, this poetry collection reimagines how we survive and care alongside family loyalties, death and dementia. Helen Swain is a poet of our unfathomable futures who mingles love and legacy with shot rabbits and disposable sheets to offer us an original and searing pastoral requiem.' - Dr Katrina Schlunke, Adjunct Associate Professor, Sydney University

'In the tradition of O. Henry but with a modern multicultural perspective, Ms Hand writes with authenticity and empathy about the lives of ordinary people who, we see through her eyes, are anything but ordinary. We meet gossips and lovers, lonely hearts and cads, deep thinkers and daydreamers, fruit sellers and businessmen, students and soldiers, and a host of other characters whose unexceptional lives take unexpected turns. Ms Hand's writing reflects a delicious balance of thoughtful curiosity, healthy scepticism, and the kind of wholesome voyeurism we all have but are reluctant to confess. These stories are full of fun. And after reading a few of them, the next time you find yourself standing next to a stranger you won't be able to resist thinking "e;Hum, I wonder what he's all about..."e;' - Harriet Milks, Senior Assistant Attorney General, State of Alaska'Christine is a curious observer of people, places and spaces, with nuanced and detailed description drawing the reader into her stories. These tales of new encounters transport us into everyday lives both familiar and unfamiliar, in all their joy and messiness. Her keen ear for dialogue breathes life into the characters and the varying locales add a layer of cultural observance. The stories can be comfortably read in one sitting, never outstaying their welcome.' - Rebekah Brammer, journal reviewer'Stories of love, naivety, larrikinism are set in countries of very different cultural backgrounds. Clever plots [are] full of suspense with unexpected endings. Characters have ventures that do not go to plan. Pursuing love for some seems futile. Others create problems for themselves.' - Kath Harrison, writer/philosopher

'Anthony Mills is a master of the metaphor who is also blessed with a musician's ear. His poems are often powerfully elegiac in tone, subtly suffused with a quiet grieving that always finds the perfect tone, is never maudlin and always linked to the concrete sensory details of the everyday as "e;recollected in tranquillity"e;. These are spiritual poems in the best, non-anodyne, sense: infused with the sensory, open, probing, extremely rich in unexpected images that open new levels of imaginative resonance in the reader. A stunning, powerful debut collection. Read it, and, with me, eagerly await the next.' - Peter Lach-Newinsky'Miracle of Days offers a range of finely observed poems which fearlessly expose life's heartwood - from imaginative sequences around the life of Francis of Assisi to delicate and insightful renderings of childhood, family, the deep poignancy of loss and misalignment as well as of deep connection. This is a lyric mode which marks the "e;beat of early years"e;, tracing its reverberations in the attentive moments of reflective experience.' - Rose Lucas'Anthony Mills' poetry explores a vast region of possibilities until it feels that nothing is outside his scope...this is poetry that soars and takes us with it.' - Greg Tome'This first collection is strongly crafted and deeply empathetic...the poems know pain and exhilaration.' - Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

In his third collection of poems, Geoff Graetz presents many of his observations about life along with his expressions of concern about present-day social issues. He writes in a style that is intended to be easily understood and has included some light-hearted reflections on the world as it is today. His travels have provided him with opportunities to write about places he has visited. His hope is that this collection will be an enjoyable read.

'Collins has considerable descriptive powers and an originality of viewpoint not unlike that of some of the English "e;Martian"e; poets...a striking denseness of imagery and ingenuity of observation...' - Geoff Page

The poems in this latest collection by award-winning poet Philip Radmall stand us at the starting point of new experiences and states, and follow the forces and callings that summon us out from where we are and bring us back either more knowing or else with a better understanding that there are deeper questions. In language that has been described as 'melodious' and that 'immerses us magnificently' into its subject matter (Denise O'Hagan, editor, The Blue Nib), these poems articulate the fine shifts of thought and feeling as we cross boundaries (outwardly and inwardly) of place, landscape and time, and the tests and revelations encountered in passing through.