"Moon over Melbourne" was Ouyang Yu's first English-language collection after his immigration from China to Australia and is the quintessential record of the immigrant experience, a mixture of delight and rage, of wonder and frustration. First published in 1995, this expanded edition now brings his work to a wider audience: his brutally frank, disturbing narratives and lyrics speak across borders. Ouyang Yu is a controversial figure within Australian literature, sometimes characterised as 'the a...
This is a new collection from a well-loved poet of suburbia, families, workplaces, ordinary life. The stunning first section explores the pains and pleasures (mostly the pains) of becoming a schoolteacher in midlife. The second section, 'televisioner', is a single long sequence that views the over-confident 1980s from the unlikely perspective of a receptionist for a television station. The poet plays with the news and the people and stories behind the news, remembering the Springbok tour, a bomb...
The Lakes of Mars is a stunning new collection of poems by Chris Orsman that follow on from his most recent book, South: An Antarctic Journey, a sequence about Captain Scott's final expedition to Antarctica. These new poems are a characteristic mix of thoughtful reflection and precise imagery of landscape and object. Chris Orsman captures 'the plainness of life' with a visual clarity, but always pushes his descriptions further, broadening the poems 'into intellectual and moral meaning'. He is al...
This fourth in AUP's New Poets series includes three very different voices. Chris Tse's work draws fascinatingly on his family history and Chinese heritage. His selection, "Sing Joe", includes narrative poems about his great-grandparents' emigration to New Zealand and about his own childhood and his research to uncover their story. Erin Scudder writes sophisticated, dark and flavoursome poetry with close attention to the sound and shape of words. In its treatment of motive and emotion her work f...
